Series V
Volume 5
National Security
Agency
Central Security
Service
CCH-E05B-01-01
The InvtsihCe CryptoCbgists:
J^rican-JAmericanSy 1 VWII to 1956
Table of Contents
Page
Foreword.v
Acknowledgments.vii
Introduction .l
Chapter l - Race Relations on the Home Front at the
Onset of WWII .2
Chapter 2 - 1939-1946: African-Americans Join the SIS .5
Chapter 3 - 1944-1946: The Commercial Code Unit .10
Chapter 4 - 1947: Changing Demographics.15
Chapter 5 - 1948-1951: The Dark Side of the Golden Age of
Russian Plain Text .19
Chapter 6 - 1948-1951: Wanted -
Key Punchers and Equipment Operators.24
Chapter 7 - 1948: R&D - A Different Kind of Place.27
Chapter 8 - 1951: Color Barrier Broken in Security Division .30
Chapter 9 - 1950-1954: Strides toward Broad Integration;
Breakup of the Plantation.33
Epilogue
39
Foreword
The origins of this book were in the cryptologic
equivalent of an urban legend and a couple of pho¬
tographs.
During research on the early days of NSA, his¬
torians at the Center for Cryptologic History (CCH)
learned of the employment of African-Americans at
the Agency in the period after World War II.
Occasionally, in informal conversations with for¬
mer NSA seniors, the subject of minority history
would come up, and CCH historians collected anec¬
dotes about segregated offices in the early days. It
became apparent that the employment of African-
Americans came even earlier than previously
thought. No information, however, confirmed any
contribution by African-Americans during the
world war.
In early 1996, the History Center received as a
donation a book of rather monotonous photo¬
graphs of civilian employees at one of NSA’s prede¬
cessors receiving citations for important contribu¬
tions. Out of several hundred photographs, only
two included African-Americans - an employee
receiving an award from Colonel Preston
Corderman (reproduced on page 14) and the same
employee posing with his family.
Although undated, the matrix of the photo¬
graph indicated it had been taken in 1945 or early
1946. This made it likely the person was receiving
an award for wartime contributions.
It therefore became a high priority in the
History Center to investigate the story behind this
photograph and learn the truth behind the uncon¬
nected anecdotes about African-Americans in the
early days of the cryptologic organization.
In 1998 it became possible to hire a few addi¬
tional historians for a year to supplement the
History Center’s permanent staff. Ms. Jeannette
Will i ams applied to research the early history of
African-Americans in cryptology.
Assisted by Ms. Yolande Dickerson, Ms.
Williams undertook an exhaustive search of the
cryptologic archives and recovered the basic story
of the segregated cryptologic organizations -
including the previously unknown existence of a
large office of African-Americans in World War II.
The basic facts about this unit preserved in offi¬
cial records, however, shed little light on the social
milieu of the time or the eventual movement of
African-Americans into the cryptologic main¬
stream.
Compiling - and constantly expanding - a list
of names of African-Americans who worked in the
early days of NSA and its predecessor organiza¬
tions, they conducted an exceedingly vigorous pro¬
gram of oral history interviews. These interviews
personalized the stark facts found in the docu¬
ments.
In fact, this monograph rescues an important
historical story that might otherwise have been lost.
It should also be noted that this was a last-minute
rescue. Several important figures had already
passed away by the time the research for this book
began, and several more have passed away between
the time of their interviews and the publication of
this book.
The story that the author tells is by turns infuri¬
ating and inspiring. But it needs to be faced square¬
ly from both these aspects.
I recommend The Invisible Cryptologists:
African-Americans, WWII to 1956 as essential
reading for all who are interested in the early days
of cryptology, all who are interested in the social
history of NSA and its predecessors, and all who are
interested in the history of American race relations.
Page v
For further background on cryptologic activities
during World War II and the early days of NSA,
readers are encouraged to refer to A History of U.S.
Communications Intelligence during World War
II: Policy and Administration by Robert L. Benson
and The Origins of the National Security Agency
by Thomas L. Burns (forthcoming). Both publica¬
tions are available from the Center for Cryptologic
History.
David A. Hatch
Director, Center for Cryptologic History
Page vi
Acknowledgments
My friend and assistant, Yolande Dickerson,
must share the credit for whatever is right with this
book. Appointment setter, record keeper, tran¬
scriber, and researcher - she did it all, and with
marvelous good cheer. Thank you, Yolande.
For the inspiration that sparked this project and
for critical reviews of many drafts, I am thankful to
Dr. David Hatch of the Center for Cryptologic
History (CCH). Dr. Thomas Johnson, formerly of
the Center, was my early mentor, and I am indebt¬
ed to him for his professional guidance and quick
friendship. Others at NSA that must be remem¬
bered at this time are the Archives Division staff,
particularly Danny Wilson, Mike Scott, John
Hanson, and Tom Lubey, who were so responsive
to my many, many requests; Barry Carleen and
Barbara Vendemia of the CCH Publications team,
for their skillful editing; Lou Benson and Patricia
Brown, Office of Security, for historical information
on security matters; and Patricia Nelson of the
Phoenix Society, for providing critical data that
enabled us to contact numerous Agency retirees.
James Gilbert, INSCOM Historian, deserves
special recognition for directing me to an Army his¬
tory that named the early African-American cryp-
tologists. John Taylor of the National Archives and
Records Administration also provided important
lead information as well as outstanding file
retrieval support. Thank you, John.
For the support of my husband Walter, daugh¬
ter Darice, son Erik, and sister Thomasina, I am
and always will be deeply grateful. They understood
that, given the opportunity, I was obligated to write
this history, not only to document the contributions
of the early African-American cryptologists to the
Agency’s mission, but also to help identify for
today’s cryptologists the roots of the racial concerns
that plagued NSA for decades afterwards. If I have,
in any small way, met this obligation, it is due to the
unselfish participation of the many former Agency
employees who told me their stories. To them, my
profoundest thanks. To the African-Americans
among them who served at Arlington Hall, I am
particularly grateful, for though the memories were
sometimes painful, they freely shared their experi¬
ences, their disappointments, and their successes.
To them, this book is fondly dedicated.
Jeannette Williams
Page vii
Introduction
This is the story of African-Americans
employed by the National Security Agency, and its
forerunners at Arlington Hall Station, from 1939 to
1956. It is, in part, an organizational history, since
for most of that period, the overwhelming majority
of African-Americans were segregated in primarily
support elements, consistent with army policies
and U.S. mores. It is also, in part, a cryptologic his¬
tory, since technology and intelligence require¬
ments factored enormously into African-American
hiring and manpower utilization. For these aspects
of the book, documents held in the NSA Archives as
well as in the National Archives and Records
Administration yielded a wealth of information.
But at its essence this book is about people who
during WWII and the first decade of the Cold War
were limited primarily to positions in the federal
agency akin to those held in the private sector -
critical, but low-paying, support jobs. Extensive
oral interviews of both blacks and whites who
worked there during the period added the human
dimension to the research data and revealed the
tremendous gulf between America’s promise of
equality and the reality, even within the federal
bureaucracy.
The exhaustive interviews conducted for this
book also include testimonies to the changes that
occurred within the Agency, reflective of progress
after President Truman’s February 1948 message to
Congress on civil rights and the issuance of
Executive Order 9981 later that year which man¬
dated the integration of the armed services. The
book closes in 1956 as NSA is reorganizing and relo¬
cating to Fort Meade, Maryland. As part of the reor¬
ganization, a large, predominantly black organiza¬
tion, one of the most visible symbols of racial divi¬
sion within the Agency, was dismantled. Thus
ended a major chapter in the Agency’s social histo¬
ry, but for years afterward, issues of fairness and
equality would continue to be at the forefront of the
consciousness of many African-Americans at the
National Security Agency.
Page 1
Chapter 1 - Race Relations on the Home Front at the Onset ofWWII
Though thirteen million American
Negroes have more often than not been
denied democracy, they are American citi¬
zens and will as in every war give unquali¬
fied support to the protection of their
country. At the same time we shall not
abate one iota our struggle for full citizen¬
ship rights here in the United States. We
will fight but we demand the right to fight
as equals in every branch of military, naval
and aviation service. - From minutes of
NAACP Board of Directors meeting, 8 December
1941 1
The African-American experience at Arlington
Hall Station (AHS), home of the National Security
Agency and its Army predecessor organizations
from 1942 to the mid-fifties, was shaped by a com¬
plex set of forces. In the simplest terms, African-
American employment, as was that of individuals in
any other group, was dictated by the intelligence
needs of the nation’s political and military leaders.
The volume of target communications to be exploit¬
ed that would provide the needed information and
the systems available to process the data translated
into manpower requirements. The nature of that
employment, however, and the surrounding cultur¬
al environment reflected broader issues - the racial
policies of the U.S. Army and the state of racial inte¬
gration in America at large.
Although, to its credit, the racially integrated
U.S. Army of the mid-fifties was a decade ahead of
most civilian institutions on civil rights issues, the
army of the early forties was viciously Jim Crow:
... The policy of the War department is not
to intermingle colored and white person¬
nel in the same regimental organizations.
This policy has been proven satisfactory
over a long period of years and to make
changes would produce situations destruc¬
tive to morale and detrimental to the
preparations for national defense. - Memo
from Robert P. Patterson, Assistant Secretary of
War, to President Roosevelt, 27 September 1940 2
In December 1941, nearly 100,000 African-
Americans were serving in the racially segregated
U.S. Army, the vast majority in infantry, engineer¬
ing, and quartermaster units. Less than 2 percent of
enlistees were in the Signal Corps, and over the next
seven months that percentage declined to less than
1 percent. 3 The basis for the Army position on
African-American integration 4 was threefold. The
two most commonly cited reasons were that the
Army reflected the desires of the American people
and was not an instrument for social change, and
that it was efficient to use personnel according to
their skills and capabilities. General George C.
Marshall, Army chief of staff, articulated these
arguments in a 1 December 1941 memorandum to
Secretary of War Henry Stimson:
The problems presented with reference
to utilizing Negro personnel in the army
should be faced squarely. In doing so, the
following facts must be recognized: first
that the War Department cannot ignore
the social relationship between Negroes
and whites which has been established by
the American people through custom and
habit; second, that either through lack of
educational opportunities or other causes
the level of intelligence and occupational
skill of the Negro population is consider¬
ably below that of the white; third, that the
army will attain its maximum strength
only if its personnel is [sic] properly
placed in accordance with the capabilities
of individuals; and fourth, that experi¬
ments within the army in the solution of
Page 2
social problems are fraught with dan¬
ger to efficiency, discipline, and
morale.
. . the level of intelligence and occupational
skill of the Negro population is considerably below
that of the white.” The third plank underpinning
the Army’s rigid segregationist policies was the
belief that African-Americans were inferior. An
Army War College (AWC) study published in
October 1925 concluded that “the black man was
physically unqualified for combat duty; was by
nature subservient, mentally inferior, and believed
himself to be inferior to the white man; was suscep¬
tible to the influence of crowd psychology; could
not control himself in the face of danger; and did
not have the initiative and resourcefulness of the
white man.” 6
Twelve years later, a similar “study” purported
to present the Negro personality characteristics
that commanders were likely to meet: “As an indi¬
vidual the negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted,
care free and good-natured. If unjustly treated he is
likely to become surly and stubborn, though this is
usually a temporary phase. He is careless, shiftless,
irresponsible and secretive. He resents censure and
is best handled with praise and by ridicule. He is
unmoral, untruthful and his sense of right doing is
relatively inferior.” 7
The significance of these and other AWC stud¬
ies cannot be underestimated. Historian Alan Osur
concluded that the 1925 study “establishes the
impact of racism upon the minds of these field
grade officers of the 1920s who, generally speaking,
would become the commanders in World War II.
The importance of their early learning cannot be
overstated in understanding their subsequent
behavior.” 8
Clarence Toomer, an African-American NSA
retiree, was a young Army enlistee in 1942.
Interviewed in January 2000, he recalled his per¬
sonal experience with army mandated segregation
during World War II:
I grew up and went to school in
Fayetteville, North Carolina. After the
third year of high school, I decided that I
wanted to see the world and I went off and
joined the army. This was in 1942.
I was in the Quartermaster Corps. It’s
transportation now. We moved trucks and
supplies or anything that had to be moved.
It was an all-black regiment except for the
officers. We first went to the West Coast,
then we were shipped to Australia. In fact,
I was on the maiden voyage of the Queen
Elizabeth. They brought the ship to San
Francisco to protect it from being dam¬
aged by the Germans while it was still
under construction. Then they converted it
to a troop ship. We had 10,000 troops on
that ship, stacked four high in elaborate
cabins which had forty people in them. It
took thirty-nine days to zigzag across the
Pacific.
You hear all kinds of stories about
Australians not liking blacks, but the citi¬
zens were cordial. They received us with
open arms. The people in Melbourne had
Sunday teas in their homes and churches
and would invite the black troops, and we
went. They also had skating rinks in the
city, but the white Americans identified a
recreation area for black troops only. The
American government, the American mili¬
tary did that - not the Australians.
Of course, the Army was right about one thing;
it did largely reflect civilian attitudes. Schools,
housing, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and
recreational facilities were legally segregated by
race in much of the country. Carl Dodd, the grand¬
son of slaves, was a War Department messenger
and clerk for approximately six years before joining
the Army Security Agency, an NSA forerunner, in
Page 3
1948. He vividly remembers the discrimination and
intimidation endured by blacks in rural North
Carolina during the Depression:
I grew up poor in Smithville. I went to
school many days in coveralls and bare
feet, and my parents couldn’t afford to buy
books. In North Carolina, they didn’t fur¬
nish [blacks with] books until somewhere
around 1936 or 1937. Of course, the
schools were segregated. Some black kids
could buy books, but many couldn’t. I used
to borrow books from my classmates dur¬
ing activity periods and read in the library.
There was a large family of us and we just
couldn’t do things. We owned our land and
home. That’s it. My daddy sold a tremen¬
dous amount of land during the ‘30s trying
to survive. Nobody worked much but my
dad, and he was born of a slave parent.
When I speak about him, it hurts me. He
couldn’t read or write, but he wanted his
kids to get an education. We got what we
could.
I came to Washington in 1941, because
the Ku Klux Klan activity was terrible, and
I had many, many fights with white people.
My uncle was hit by a car, and I still don’t
understand it. An automobile at that time,
mostly an A-model Ford or a T-model
Ford, came by maybe every thirty minutes.
So he had to have been put in front of a car
and then hit. Many blacks were killed, and
nobody ever knew and nobody ever cared.
My mother and father thought it best that I
leave. I was seventeen years old. 9
The African-American press and civil rights
organizations pressed the Roosevelt administra¬
tion, the military, and the nation’s political parties
for change. The contradiction between an America
at war against fascism abroad while inflicting racial
injustices on its citizens at home was inescapable.
This national struggle over equality became the
impetus for a sea change in the employment of
African-Americans at AHS.
Page 4
Chapter 2 - 1939-1946: African-Americans Join the SIS
German Army Attacks Poland;
Cities Bombed
Havas, French news agency, announced
that a German declaration of war against
Poland probably will lead France and
Great Britain to take new military meas¬
ures. Britain and France are committed to
aid Poland in any fight to save her inde¬
pendence. - New York Times, September 1,
1939
At the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939,
the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS), 10 the fledg¬
ling U.S. cryptologic organization, had been in exis¬
tence less than ten years. Created in 1930 in the
Army’s Office of the Chief Signal Officer (OCSigO),
it represented the consolidation of the missions of
two post-WWI organizations. First, the SIS was to
develop secure codes for U.S. military communica¬
tions (communications security or COMSEC), for¬
merly the responsibility of the Code and Cipher
Section in the OCSigO. During wartime, it was also
to intercept and solve enemy code and cipher mes¬
sages (communications intelligence or COMINT), a
role that had been assigned to the Cipher Bureau
(MI-8) of the General Staff during WWI and con¬
tinued primarily as a training mission after demo¬
bilization. At its formation, William F. Friedman,
the Army’s foremost cryptologist in the Code and
Cipher Section, was named to lead the new organi¬
zation. After hiring a secretary, Miss Louise
Newkirk, he acquired four “junior cryptanalysts” -
three mathematicians - Frank Rowlett, Abe
Sinkov, and Solomon Kullback, and a Japanese lin¬
guist, John Hurt. Added to this small contingent
during that first year were an Army officer, Captain
Norman Lee Baldwin, whose job would be to estab¬
lish the Second Signal Service Company, the inter¬
cept division of SIS; Lieutenant Mark Rhodes, a
Signal Corps officer; and Larry Clark, a chemistry
major who would analyze secret inks. These few
individuals comprised the SIS in December 1930. 11
In his account of the history of the SIS, William
Friedman was unequivocal about the initial basis of
the small organization’s cryptanalytic activities.
Interception and decoding of foreign communica¬
tions were to be undertaken as training in prepara¬
tion for the execution of its wartime mission, not as
peacetime activities. Particularly interesting infor¬
mation uncovered as a by-product of this training
would be shown to the Army Assistant Chief of
Staff, G2, but there was not a functioning peacetime
mission to actively collect and exploit the commu¬
nications of targeted foreign governments. 12 It was
in the execution of this training mission during the
mid-i930s, however, that SIS made an indelible
impression on senior War Department officials and
paved the way for its future expansion. By 1933, the
monitoring stations in Fort Monmouth, New
Jersey, and at the Presidio in San Francisco were
regularly providing intercepts of Japanese diplo¬
matic communications (commonly referred to as
“traffic”), the War Department’s highest priority
intelligence target. In 1936, the SIS, chiefly Frank
Rowlett, broke the Japanese diplomatic code gen¬
erated by the “Red” machine and used for their
most sensitive communications. The recovered
plaintext messages gave the nation’s policy makers
and military leaders unprecedented insight into the
developing political ties between Japan, Germany,
and Italy.
Thus, although fewer than twenty people com¬
prised the SIS in mid-1939, it had established its
value to the national leadership and plans existed
for both gradual, modest, peacetime growth and
contingency expansion during a national emer¬
gency. Eleven days after Hitler’s army goose-
stepped into Poland, the Chief Signal Officer rec¬
ommended that funds be released for the acquisi-
Page 5
tion of twenty-five additional civilians and more
equipment in preparation for implementing its
wartime mission. This was soon revised to reflect a
request for funds for expansion, to include funds
for twenty-six (rather than twenty-five) additional
civilians. The final recommendation was approved,
and by the end of the year expansion of the SIS pro¬
fessional force of cryptologists and linguists had
begun. 13
Although neither reflected in the War
Department authorization letter nor noted in the
histories, the tiny secret agency was increased by at
least one other employee in late 1939.
On 13 November,
Bernard W. Pryor, a
thirty-nine-year-
old former
motorcycle
messenger for
the Navy
Department,
entered on
duty as the
SIS messen¬
ger. Almost
certainly he
was the first
African
American to be
hired at the
agency. 14
Bernard Pryor
(later photo)
“In 1938, of the 9,717 Negroes regularly
employed by the federal government in
Washington, 90 percent held custodial jobs for
which the top annual pay rate was $1,260; only
9.5 percent had clerical jobs, and only 47 men
had suhprofessional rank.” 15
“The population of the metropolitan
[Washington, D.C.] area mushroomed from
621,000 in 1930 to well over a million by the
end of 1941. Seventy thousand new people
arrived in the first year after Pearl Harbor
alone. Government employment had more
than doubled since the beginning of 1940, and
more than five thousand new federal workers
were pouring into Washington every month,
often bringing their families with them.”
David Brinkley, Washington Goes To War (New
York, NY, 1988), 107
SIS personnel authorizations, by July 1942, had
increased to 364 civilians and 121 officers. 16 Already
desperately short of space at the Munitions
Building, but still expanding to support the war
effort, the Army purchased a women’s junior col¬
lege at 4000 Lee Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia, for
the burgeoning agency. The new location had an
added advantage. The now vital SIS would be
removed from downtown Washington where it was
believed it was more vulnerable to enemy bombing
or agent activity. 17 By the end of the summer, most
of the agency had relocated to what came to be
called Arlington Hall Station (AHS).
Frequently described as a beautiful, campus¬
like facility, AHS experienced rapid wartime
growth. By mid-July 1943, 1,713 civilians, 157 offi¬
cers, and 240 enlisted personnel 18 were distributed
across six sections, most under the direction of a
military officer:
Chief, Signal Security Agency
Colonel W. Preston Corderman
Director of Communications Research
Mr. William F. Friedman
A Branch/Protective Security
Major J.C. Sheetz
Page 6
B Branch/Cryptanalytic
(solution of codes and ciphers)
Lt. Colonel Earle F. Cooke
C Branch/Cryptographic
(communications security)
Colonel Clinton B. Allsopp
D Branch/Laboratory
(secret inks)
Lt. Colonel A.J. McGrail
E Branch/Communications
Lt. Colonel H. McD. Brown
F Branch/Development
Major Leo Rosen
(From Organizational Chart, Signal Security
Service, 15 April 1943-1 March 1944 (NSA Archives,
Accession No. 18675)).
The larger population of linguists, cryptana¬
lysts, engineers, and mathematicians was reflected
in the increased hiring of messengers, probably all
of whom were Afro-American. By mid-1943, Bernie
Pryor was the senior messenger of fifteen, but one
SIS researcher’s comments suggest they were
stereotyped as “colored” servants of limited intelli¬
gence:
It often happens that translators in dis¬
tant wings are too remote and hot to bring
questions personally. An attempt has been
made to improve the situation by utilizing
North Carolina messengers. They come,
but either have not understood the mes¬
sage or have forgotten it on the way. 19
* * * *
The nation’s capital that drew the new civil ser¬
vants, both black and white, was a boom town.
Seventeen-year-old Carl Dodd was a construction
worker in the District of Columbia before becoming
a messenger in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer
during WWII. In his oral interview, he vividly
described the living conditions for many African-
American residents during this period of rapid
expansion and provided a telling glimpse of the
state of civil rights in the capital city as the country
entered WWII.
Washington was very, very poor at that
time. Where the Pentagon building is,
there used to be a Hot Shoppe and an air¬
field. There was a ‘colored’ area right near
there called Queen City. The Pentagon
took all the property these people had.
Then they built houses for the people that
they had thrown out. That is when I saw
the first low income housing - off of
Columbia Pike, near Arlington — right near
the Navy Department. It was called
Johnson Hill. The people had to have some
place to live; however, some of these build¬
ings were like shanties, and they had
cesspools - no plumbing. But it was their
homes. You can’t pay somebody $200 or
$250 for a house and replace it for that
amount of money, but that’s what the gov¬
ernment did. Just like they did in south¬
west [District of Columbia]. Many of those
houses in southwest had no plumbing.
They had a big truck to come around and
pick up the sewage from the houses in big
buckets. They used to call it the ‘honey
wagon’, and you could smell it for blocks.
People lived wherever they could get low
rent. When I first came to Washington [in
1941], I lived in a room on Fairfax Drive,
and I got a job doing construction work. I
paid $3.50 a week for my room, and I got
$7.00 a week as a salary. When I went into
the government in 1942, I was hired as a
CU [custodial] 3 [$1,200 per year]. After
taxes, I took home $42 every two weeks. So
I had clothes, rent, food - everything to
take care of. I had nothing left. Things
weren’t good, but a lot of black people
Page 7
came to Washington thinking things were
much better than they really were.
My first government job in 1942 was as a
messenger for the Office of the Chief
Signal Officer, and I was at the Munitions
Building at 2nd and T Street, Southwest
[District of Columbia]. At that time, the
cafeteria was segregated. I think it was
desegregated about the same time as the
Pentagon was completed. Roosevelt
ordered that there would be no more seg¬
regation in the cafeteria. Prior to then, we
could not go into it. They had little cubby
holes in the back where you could go and
get food, if you wanted, but I didn’t go
there. I went to a place on the wharf called
Benny Bordnick’s. We couldn’t go in there
and sit down either, but we could buy their
fish sandwiches, crabcakes, or whatever
we wanted and take it back. We got a good
buy, and we got good food. There was
another place called Cadillac, a black
place, but we always went to Benny
Bordnick’s and brought our food back.
* * * *
In early 1944, Colonel W. Preston Corderman,
a 1926 West Point graduate from Hagerstown,
Maryland, was chief of what was then being
called the Signal Security Agency. Earle F.
Cooke, who once headed the COMSEC side
of the agency (C Branch), was chief of the
cryptanalysis effort (B Branch).
Interviewed years later, General Cooke
described a pivotal conversation between
the two that led to the creation of a segre¬
gated unit of black cryptologists at AHS.
Eleanor Roosevelt, through her
channels ... had the Signal Corps
advise that... twelve percent or
fifteen percent of our personnel had to
be black and gainfully employed. A
problem. We had one who was a mes¬
senger. I can’t remember his name.
Racked my brain and I can’t remember it.
Anyway, the problem was, what do we do
now, because here we have a directive and
we’re going to have to put a lot of black
people to work. We decided, I guess I did,
because Corderman said to me,‘Your job.
I’m not going to have them on any other
staff. I’m going to have them on your staff,
okay?’ The problem [was] what to do and I
decided I’m going to keep this bunch as a
unit and find something which they can do
worthwhile. The only help I had in select¬
ing black personnel was this messenger.
Well, I liked the guy. He was a good guy,
and he was a hard-working guy and I told
him I got this problem. I got to have about
a hundred and some odd people of your
race (‘niggers’ in that day), and I says,
you’re my personnel officer to see that I get
the right ones. Did a marvelous job. Where
the hell he got them and how he got them,
I knew not. I put him in touch with the per¬
sonnel people and said, that guy is my rep¬
resentative in hiring these people. Your
job is to hire them when he says so. And he
did. I haven’t the slightest idea
[what criteria he used], but
we gave them some stuff
working on some Allied
system. I don’t know
what system we had
them on. ... It
doesn’t matter.
The output, of
course, was more
or less negative
. . . but so what?
We had the unit,
had no problem. 20
Page 8
[Editor’s Note: There is no actual documenta¬
tion that Mrs. Roosevelt ordered the hiring of
African-Americans either in the Signal Corps or at
AHS. Given the nature of the social picture at the
time, however, such actions needed the interven¬
tion of “someone in a high place."]
The messenger whose name General Cooke
could no longer recall was William (Bill) Coffee,
once a houseman and waiter at the Arlington Hall
School for Girls, who was then working for Bernie
Pryor. Born in Abingdon, Virginia, in 1917, Mr.
Coffee studied English at Knoxville College,
Tennessee, in 1936 after attending the Kings
Mountain Training School in Abingdon. During the
closing years of the Depression, from 1937 to 1940,
he was enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Thereafter followed a series of jobs as a waiter,
before he was hired in September 1941 by the
Arlington Hall School for Girls. When the Army
acquired the property, Mr. Coffee applied for a fed¬
eral position and was hired as a junior janitor for
the SIS in June 1942, eventually being promoted to
messenger. In January 1944, after Earle F. Cooke
tapped him to satisfy Mrs. Roosevelt’s concerns, he
set about building a unit that would be “gainfully
employed.” His job title was officially changed to
cryptographic clerk in June of that year, and an
organizational chart dated 15 November 1944 iden¬
tified him as Assistant Civilian In Charge of B-3-b,
with nineteen subordinate civilians. 21 Their mis¬
sion was not the analysis of Allied codes, as General
Cooke recalled, but the exploitation of commercial
coded messages. Several military officers very
briefly served as chief of the unit before the position
was assumed by Benson K. Buffham in mid-1944,
who held it first as a young military officer, then as
a civilian, until February 1947.
Page 9
Chapter 3 — 1944 - 1946 : The Commercial Code Unit
yeqyx ipeoa ipeco caozr ivmzi oatab
(Pineapple must be packed very carefully.
Mark outside of packages plainly, with
gross and net weights. Customers will pay
for cost of transshipment. Telegraph us at
time shipment is made.)
orutl yeqyx oczom
(In accordance with your telegram,
pineapple will be shipped immediately.) -
English texts and commercial code equivalents
from Acme Commodity and Phrase Code, New
York, 1923
Very quickly after the introduction of the
American Morse code for telegraphic messages, it
was recognized that this new mode of communicat¬
ing seriously threatened privacy. Inserted between
the originator and intended recipient of the infor¬
mation were persons who would translate it into
the Morse symbols and key the message and other
individuals to receive the message and render it
readable for the recipient. The most sensitive data
would, therefore, be accessible to these middlemen.
Thus, in 1845 an associate of Samuel Morse pub¬
lished a code for Morse communications, “The
Secret Corresponding Vocabulary; Adapted for Use
to Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” to provide
the message originator with a means of securing
correspondence.
As telegraph usage grew in the late 1840s and
1850s, other codes for Morse communications
appeared, but it was the laying of the first transat¬
lantic cable in 1866 that sparked an explosion of
codes for Morse communications. The driver for
this creativity was not secrecy, but economy, for the
telegraph companies charged by the word, as well
as according to the distance between the sender and
the receiver. Consequently, the economies offered
by the shorthand codes, which became known as
“commercial codes,” were extremely attractive.
Scores of industries developed lexicons that could,
with a simple group of letters, convey multiple
phrases or sentences. 22 During WWII, the informa¬
tion transmitted by foreign companies by this
means was of interest to U.S. officials, since it could
provide trade and travel data and some insight into
the economic conditions of the companies’ host
nations.
An SIS unit of four people, all Caucasians, was
actively exploiting foreign commercial coded mes¬
sages as early as February 1943. By May there were
six, and in September 1943 eight people comprised
B-2a-8, the Commercial Unit in the Code Recovery
Section of the Cryptanalytic Branch. The unit was
headed by a succession of junior Army officers in
the fall of 1943, but gradually the personnel were
transferred to other higher priority tasks, and by
December 1943 the mission was completely aban¬
doned. 23 It was a situation tailor-made for the
moment. No Caucasians were working the prob¬
lem, obviating the need to address the issue of an
integrated work unit. Clearly the work was mean¬
ingful, but if no results were produced, it would
only be a continuation of the status quo for the cus¬
tomers. On the other hand, if the unit proved pro¬
ductive, the results could be useful. Mrs.
Roosevelt’s requirements could be met.
In January 1944, Bill Coffee started his new
assignment as a cryptographic clerk. Undoubtedly
he underwent some cryptanalytic training, but a
record of courses that he might have taken at the
time is no longer available. Initially he worked
alone; then in February 1944 Annie Briggs, who
had worked with him in the messenger unit, joined
him as his assistant. 24 The unit grew in size and,
though clearly an operational unit with core mis-
Page 10
sion responsibilities, for several months it was
retained as a staff element reporting to the chief of
the Cryptanalytic Branch, consistent with
Corderman’s direction to Cooke. A memorandum
announcing one of the many Signal Security Agency
reorganizations alluded to this inconsistency:
Effective 21 August [1944], the
Intelligence Division [formerly the
Cryptanalytic Branch or B Branch] was
organized to consist of an Office of the
Division Chief and five operating branch¬
es. ... The Commercial Traffic Section has,
for reasons of policy, been retained under
the control of the Division Chief instead of
being absorbed into the General
Cryptanalytic Branch [one of the five sub¬
ordinate branches of the Intelligence
Division], which might normally appear to
be its proper location. 25
Eventually, however, logic prevailed. By mid-
November 1944, the unit became part of the
General Cryptanalytic Branch, which was headed
by Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett, one of the
four original cryptanalysts hired by William
Friedman. Its designator became B-3-b. The orga¬
nizational chart reflects Lieutenant Benson K.
Buffham as the chief and William D. Coffee, assis¬
tant civilian in charge. 26
* * * *
B-3-b, under Lieutenant Buffham and Bill
Coffee, exploited nongovernmental commercial
code messages originating from Australia, Great
Britain, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Portugal,
Bulgaria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Russia, China,
Indochina, Thailand, Japan, Egypt, South Africa,
Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and
Argentina. 27
Conventional intercept sources and the Office of
Censorship, which under the War Powers Act
received copies of all cable traffic from the U.S. car¬
riers, supplied the raw material (messages) for the
unit. Communications using both private codes and
codes available on the open market were decoded.
Messages that were found to be written in an
unknown commercial code or in an enciphered
commercial code, i.e., individual letters of the code
phrase were substituted or transposed, were ana¬
lyzed to identify the underlying codebook and ulti¬
mately to recover the plain text. Additionally, the
unit sorted and routed nongovernmental Spanish,
French, Italian, Portuguese, German, and English
plaintext messages, a task that formerly had been
accomplished by the Traffic Unit. 28
This work was accomplished by three sections.
The largest, Production, led by Annie Briggs, iden¬
tified codes, decoded messages, and provided cleri¬
cal support. Ethel Just headed a small group of
translators in the Language
unit. Herman Phynes
directed the last sec¬
tion, the B-3-b
technical ele¬
ment charged
with solving
encipher¬
ments.
Twenty-
eight years
into the
future,
Herman
Phynes would
be a GG-16,
army flag officer
equivalent, and
NSA’s first
African- Herman Phynes
American office
chief in the
Operations Directorate. In March 1944, however,
he was a subprofessional (SP)-5 cryptanalytic aide
returning to government work after brief stints as
an insurance salesman and a real estate agent. A
Washington, D.C., native, he was a graduate of
Dunbar High School and had a B.A. degree (1941)
from Howard University. His earlier government
Page 11
service was as a clerk for the Internal Revenue
Service and as a messenger and clerk in the War
Department, but dissatisfied with both the pay and
levels of responsibility, he left the civil service to
seek work more consistent with his academic back¬
ground. 29
One other significant personnel change
occurred in 1944. Bernie Piyor, the messenger for
the Signals Intelligence Service, was reassigned in
April 1944 to the Personnel Branch as a clerk.
Undoubtedly, with the anticipation of increased
hiring of African-Americans came the realization
that this segment of the workforce would require
support services. He thus became a human
resources unit for black employees, providing a
variety of employee services, including orientation
briefings, information on housing and recreational
facilities, and counseling on work, family, and per¬
sonal financial matters. 30
* * * *
Benson K. Buffham, the administrative chief of
B-3-b, had entered the Signal Corps in 1942, one
year after graduating from
Wesleyan University
(Connecticut). In
June 1999, he
looked back
nearly sixty
years and
recounted
his first
days at
Arlington
Hall and
his early
assignment
as head of the
first group of
African-
American
cryptologists.
Benson K. Buffham
When I first went to Arlington Hall, I
worked as a cryptanalyst (or cryppie) for
about six months, working Japanese diplo¬
matic communications. Then, a very good
friend of mine at the time, Captain Mike
Maloney, who was Frank Rowlett’s plans
and priorities officer, 31 was assigned over¬
seas, and he recommended to Colonel
Rowlett that I replace him. So I became the
plans and priorities officer on the staff of
B3. It was then that I was also assigned, as
one of my duties, the job with the just
emerging black unit. Maloney had that job
before me, and when I replaced him I took
that job as well. I was introduced to Bill
Coffee and became the head of the unit;
however, Coffee was really the operating
head of the unit. I had other jobs to do at
the same time. He was full-time in that job,
and he was really the expert. I was the
reporting chain for them, so Coffee report¬
ed to me, and I got all of his reports and
reviewed them. I wouldn’t say that I
reviewed them all before they went out,
but if they thought they had anything real¬
ly significant, Coffee would show it to me
first.
I was located maybe a hundred yards
away from Coffee’s area at a desk outside
Colonel Rowlett’s office. There were
maybe fifteen or so people on the staff,
including his secretary and personnel peo¬
ple. I didn’t have an office. The B-3-b unit
was in a separate room. Colonel Rowlett
was very interested in the unit and would
visit them from time to time. Bill Coffee sat
right at the head and was really in charge
of that area. At the time, we had a large
number of black Americans working in
what I would call custodial type jobs at
Arlington Hall, but Mr. Coffee’s unit was
the only professional unit that I’m aware
of.
Page 12
We had the Office of Censorship in
World War II, and one of my jobs was to go
down to Censorship every day and collect
the international material which was flow¬
ing through them, but which they weren’t
processing. They were only interested in
things originating in or destined for the
United States. Everything had to be filed
with them, and they would examine mate¬
rial that was coming in or out of the U.S.,
but they wouldn’t be able to examine mate¬
rial that was going from Tokyo, for exam¬
ple, to a number of foreign cities. That
[international] material all fell within the
realm of responsibility of the SIS. All that
material had to be examined by our com¬
mercial code unit.
They [B-3-b analysts] were responsible
for detecting anything that would be tran¬
spiring which wasn’t routine trade. Of
course there was a great deal of traffic,
because we were monitoring all the inter¬
national communications, particularly
from Tokyo and Berlin - all the enemy
traffic. But, it all had to be gone through,
because you had to be sure that we weren’t
missing something that would be a viola¬
tion of the international embargoes.
Although item for item, it wasn’t as impor¬
tant as diplomatic traffic, they performed
an invaluable service by going through all
that material and making sure there was¬
n’t anything in it that would have been use¬
ful for us in the wartime effort. 32
* * * *
For several months, B-3-b continued to expand
in mission and resources under Bill Coffee. In April
1945, it was assigned responsibility for exploiting
the diplomatic systems of Belgium, Haiti, Liberia,
and Luxembourg, though there is no evidence that
this mission developed past the research stage. By
June, Bill Coffee was directing the efforts of thirty
people distributed over six sections, plus a secre¬
tary. Most were engaged in the major activities of
code identification and decoding; researching and
analyzing unknown codes; and translating. 33
Major international trade activity resumed fol¬
lowing the end of WWII with a concomitant sub¬
stantial rise in the volume of commercial coded
messages, but agency postwar personnel losses
were reflected in the sharply reduced manning of B-
3-b (renamed WDGAS-93K when the Signals
Security Division became the Army Security Agency
in September 1945). In July 1946, it was composed
of fewer than a dozen people.
In February 1946, Bill Coffee was transferred to
the Intercept Control Branch as the supervisor of a
new typing unit which had been formed to augment
the automatic morse transcription section of near¬
by Vint Hill Farms in Warrenton, Virginia. In the
two years that he was associated with the
Commercial Code unit, he had advanced from a
CAF-3 ($1,620/year) to a CAF-5 ($2,430/year). 34
Replacing him as assistant O.I.C. (officer in charge)
of the African-American commercial code cryptolo-
gists was his principal assistant, Herman Phynes.
On 3 April 1946, General W. Preston
Corderman, chief, Army Security Agency, present¬
ed William D. Coffee with the prestigious
Commendation for Meritorious Civilian Service.
In February 1947, the practice of having a
Caucasian as the nominal head of the Commercial
Code unit ended with the appointment of Herman
Phynes to the position of O.I.C. He was a P-2
(Professional Level -2) with an annual salary of
$3,522.6 o. 35
Page 13
W illiam Coffee receiving the Meritorious Service
Award from General W. Preston Corderman, Chief,
ASA,
3 April 1946
Although B-3-b was a unique and unprecedent¬
ed organization, these early African-American
cryptanalysts and translators appear to have been
virtually invisible. Few former Agency employees
who were interviewed and who worked at AHS dur¬
ing WWII had any knowledge of African-Americans
in professional positions; most did not even recall
seeing African-Americans on the campus.
* * * ■ 55 -
Page 14
Chapter 4 — 1947: Changing Demographics
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the
Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
across the Continent. Behind that line lie
all the capitals of the ancient states of
Central and Eastern Europe. - Winston
Churchill at Westminster College, Fulton,
Missouri, 5 March 1946
The Soviet Union - the military intentions of its
leaders, the success of its espionage efforts, the sta¬
tus of its advanced weapons and nuclear programs,
and the globalization of its political ideology - dom¬
inated the American national psyche in the decades
after WWII. The intelligence needs of the U.S. and
its closest allies translated into manpower require¬
ments which, in the late 1940s to mid-1950s, were
particularly acute at the GG-2/GG-3 level. Hiring of
African-Americans rose dramatically, and by the
early 1950s large concentrations existed in two
areas of the Operations organization: machine pro¬
cessing (specifically, equipment operations and
keypunch) and Russian plaintext processing.
Among people of color, these areas came to be
known as “Little Africa,” “the hole,” “the planta¬
tion,” and “the snakepit.”
* * * *
William Friedman is credited with introducing
IBM equipment to the Signals Intelligence Service
in 1935 for the compilation of War Department
codes. The initial acquisition consisted of a key
punch (to record the plain text that was to be
encoded and the corresponding code groups); a
sorter (to randomize the punched cards); and a
printing tabulator. Not long after the machines
were acquired, however, their utility to cryptanaly¬
sis was recognized. They became the tools to
manipulate intercepted code groups and to perform
exhaustive searches, frequency counts, compar¬
isons, and statistical computations in the effort to
uncover the underlying plain text. Initially
Friedman’s cryptanalysts operated the equipment,
but this proved inefficient as additional equipment
and personnel were acquired. In October 1939, two
full-time experienced key punchers were hired, and
the policy of training cryptanalysts on IBM equip¬
ment was discontinued. In December 1939, Ulrich
Kropfl, a tabulating equipment operator from the
new Social Security Administration, joined SIS and
became the first chief of the machine section. 36
One of the early members of the new section
was Norm Willis, a 1942 graduate of McKinley High
School in Washington, D.C., who entered on duty as
a tabulating equipment operator. Interviewed in
1999, Mr. Willis described his early assignment
sorting Japanese army traffic and the section’s
racial composition during the war years:
There were intercept operators in the
field, in Europe and in the Pacific, and they
would intercept messages and would write
them by hand. They then would somehow
ship them back to the States, so you know
by the time they arrived here, it was not
time sensitive. The messages would come
in, and we had a group of key punch oper¬
ators, mostly girls, but some military men
as well, who would put them in card form.
Then they would be edited, and once they
were accurate they might be listed or
batched in certain ways, according to the
needs of the intelligence analyst. I was an
operator on the midnight shift. We han¬
dled Japanese traffic, and I was responsi¬
ble for making sure that the cards were
accurately punched from the traffic. For
most of WWII, that is what I did, and the
only black was a man named Bill Williams.
He was custodial, but he also worked in
Page 15
supply. In other words, to punch cards,
you had to buy these sixty-pound cartons
of cards, five boxes of two thousand cards
each. IBM would ship them in, and Bill
Williams handled the unloading and load¬
ing, but there were no blacks at all in the
machine section during WWII. 37
Delores Schommer, one of the Agency’s first key
punch operators, was initially hired in 1936 for the
new Social Security Administration. It was there
that she met Ulrich Kropfl, whom William
Friedman selected in 1939 to head up the machine
section. Upon his recommendation, in July 1940
Mrs. Schommer transferred to SIS as a key punch
operator. Although wartime requirements necessi¬
tated additional personnel, she too indicated the
machine section was not integrated until later in
the 1940s.
Before the war, we had huge tabulators,
and men like Sam Snyder, Larry Clark,
and Dr. Kullback, testing out this new
equipment to see what it could do. It was
all very new. I know Ulrich wanted to get
another tabulator, and he talked with
General Akin about this. General Akin
kinda huffed and finally ordered it, but it
took quite a while to get it. Soon, I had
three girls working with me. We decided to
hire some more, so we hired five or six
more who came to work at night. We were
in a little room, probably not much bigger
than 16 feet x 18 feet. Then the war came,
and we needed to expand. They bought
Arlington Hall, and built two buildings - A
Building and B Building - and we moved
on Thanksgiving Day of ‘42. I’m not sure
when the first blacks came, but Geneva
Arthur was one of the early ones. 39
The year that the machine section first
employed African-Americans cannot be pinpoint¬
ed. Though both Norm Willis and Delores
Schommer claim there were no blacks in the unit
during WWII, Mr. Willis recalls seeing, “sometime
early on,” Alton B. Dunkinson, a technician who
would “help in the development of special hard¬
ware that you connected to the IBM equipment.”
According to David Shepard, who arrived at SIS in
1944, “Tony” Dunkinson, once a signal man for the
New York City subway system, was already there.
His career with the agency, however, lasted only
into the early fifties when he left to become an engi¬
neer at a systems development company formed by
Mr. Shepard. 40
The major influx of African-Americans into the
machine section seems to have begun in 1947.
Geneva Arthur, remembered by Delores Schommer
as “one of the early ones,” entered on duty, with
several others, in December of that year.
“Most of the civilians that were hired during
World War II were from North Carolina,
Virginia, and the South. These were white, a lot
of them young girls right out of high school.
They did not have a history of eating with peo¬
ple of color. I don’t know when it was, but one
day, in the cafeteria there was one of the other
white workers eating lunch with [a black man].
That took nerve in that time. It took courage for
the guy who was doing that because of the
social environment.”
Norm Willis, 11 January 1999
Geneva Arthur entered on duty at the Army
Security Agency in December 1947 and spent her
entire career in the key punch unit, retiring in 1973
as a section head. According to her, the key punch
unit was always integrated, whites and African-
Americans holding both supervisory and nonsuper-
visory positions. 41 Documentation on the changes
in the demographics of the machine section is
unavailable, but most retirees formerly assigned
there supported this view only with qualification.
They claim that while in the mid- to late 1940s the
organization was integrated, by the mid-fifties civil¬
ian African-Americans overwhelmingly dominated
Page 16
in nonsupervisory positions in the key punch and
tabulating equipment units. Repeatedly, the per¬
ception was voiced that the relatively few white
civilians who were assigned to entry-level positions
in the organization eventually were either promot¬
ed to successively higher supervisory positions or
transferred to other parts of the Agency.
* * * *
The ASA effort to exploit Russian plaintext traf¬
fic began in 1946 with the part-time assignment of
several linguists to the target. At that time, howev¬
er, the Agency’s emphasis was on the translation of
encrypted messages, and the employment of scarce
Russian linguists on plain text was judged to be
unwarranted. Later, in May 1947, the effort was
revised at the Pentagon. Individuals without securi¬
ty clearances or with partial clearances would sift
through volumes of messages and translate all or
parts of those determined to have intelligence
value. Placed in charge of this group was Jacob
Gurin, an ASA Russian linguist who had immigrat¬
ed to the U.S. with his parents at the age of three. A
graduate of New York University, “Jack” grew up in
a Russian-speaking house¬
hold and spoke the
language fluently.
During the war,
he served as a
Japanese lin¬
guist for the
U.S. Army,
and after
discharge,
applied to
the Army
Security
Agency. In
1946, native-
speaking
Russian lan¬
guage ability
was a valuable
and rare com¬
modity. Security
Jacob Gurin
(later photo)
concerns arising from his birthplace were resolved,
and he joined the organization as a Russian lin¬
guist. Within months of his entry on duty, he engi¬
neered a revolutionary approach to the exploitation
and reporting of Russian plaintext communica¬
tions. 42
From the Agency’s inception under William
Friedman, its business was the breaking of codes
and ciphers. Once the underlying text was revealed,
individual messages were translated, and, after a
reporting mission was established, selected ones
were published on 3” x 5” cards. While individual
decrypted messages could be extremely valuable,
plaintext messages were most often preformatted
status reports that were insignificant when consid¬
ered singly. Jack Gurin was convinced that if these
messages were assembled and analyzed in the
aggregate, they could yield valuable information on
Soviet defense capabilities. Initially, three linguists
were assigned to him plus a writer/editor. Their
task was to select messages that qualified for imme¬
diate translation and publication or which could be
used in a research report on a subject of interest.
Much of the intercept data was passed to the lin¬
guists by a group of processing personnel who
would provide page print-outs of material that had
been sent to the agency on tape. The tape conver¬
sion process involved running a paper tape of
radioprinter signals through a machine (the CXCO
tape printer) which read coded perforations and
printed the corresponding Cyrillic characters. It
was a repetitive, manual task requiring minimal
cognitive sk i lls and initially was accomplished by a
small number of whites, who gradually transferred
out of the positions. According to Agency retiree
Dave Bryant, he and fourteen other African-
Americans transferred to ASA from the Census
Bureau in 1947. They were assigned to this traffic
processing unit, and from this small cadre of black
communications clerks grew a large, essentially all¬
black division in the Operations Directorate of
NSA. 43
Page 17
CXCO tape printer
David Bryant, one of the original
African-American employees in the
Russian plaintext traffic processing unit,
(later photo)
Page 18
Chapter 5 — 1948 - 1951 : The Dark Side of the Golden Age of
Russian Plain Text
The development and expansion of the traffic
processing unit are inextricably linked to the
tremendous dependence on the exploitation of
Russian communications for intelligence following
Black Friday. That day, 25 August 1948, the chief of
the Soviet General Staff declared that “the trans¬
mission of.. . messages is permitted only by land¬
line.” Within weeks, Soviet communications sys¬
tems that had been successfully exploited since
1945 went off the air. The series of communications
changes that began in November 1947 and culmi¬
nated on Black Friday were catastrophic. Out of this
devastation, Russian plaintext communications
emerged as the critical provider of intelligence on
our primary Cold War adversary. 44
Eighteen months after Black Friday, in March
1950, the chairman of the United States
Communication Intelligence Board (USCIB)
Intelligence Committee wrote that Soviet plaintext
traffic could, at least partially, fulfill two vital intel¬
ligence requirements: (a) Soviet intentions to make
war and (b) Soviet capabilities to make war.
Accordingly, the Armed Forces Security Agency
(AFSA), as the agency was then named, was
requested to accomplish complete processing of
traffic. 45 By July 1950, over a million messages a
month were being forwarded to AFSA for process¬
ing and exploitation. The plaintext exploitation unit
stood at 170, and it was projected that by April
1952, the volume of messages requiring processing
would nearly double, requiring an additional 350
people. 46 During the 1950/1951 time frame,
Russian plain text was nearing its zenith in terms of
intelligence priorities, collection resources, and
personnel; and AFSA-213, 47 the all-black traffic
processing branch (later a division) that came to be
known as “the snakepit,” “the plantation,” and “the
black hole of Calcutta,” was in full operation.
All Russian plaintext traffic forwarded to
Arlington Hall Station from U.S. sources was
received in AFSA-213. In mid-1950, a paper deliv¬
ered to Captain Mason (AFSA-02, Chief of
Operations), entitled the “Russian Plain Text
Problem,” placed the AFSA-213 manning at 98 and
projected the 1952 personnel requirement at 218.
The paper also supplied a concise, descriptive
account of the work performed in the traffic pro¬
cessing branch:
The incoming material is of two types,
printed messages and perforated radio
printer tapes. The printed messages result
from the collection of either . . . radio
printer communications that were inter¬
cepted using standard teletype equipment
or... morse transmissions that were tran¬
scribed from undulator tape recordings.
. . . radio printer communications are
recorded and printed on perforated tele¬
type tapes in the field, and the tapes are
forwarded to AFSA for processing.
Once the material arrives in the Traffic
Division, the employees scan it for key
words, addresses, and signatures.
Messages that meet the selection criteria
are assigned a two-digit routing number
that separates them into homogenous
groupings. Messages that are on tape are
sent to the tape printing section for con¬
version to hard-copy. The selected, printed
messages are then stamped with a one-up
serial number and microfilmed. In the
final step, they are sent to the sections of
the plain text branch, according to the two-
digit routing number assigned during the
initial scanning process . 48
Page 19
William Jones worked in AFSA-213 from
November 1951 until mid-1955. In an oral interview
thirty years later, he provided a remarkably similar
account of the process, but added the human
dimension.
After I was hired and cleared, I was
marched down to the first wing, first floor
of A Building and escorted into what was a
huge wing, and in there was nothing but
black people, except there was an Air
Force major in charge of that operation.
When you walked in the door, there were
long tables, at least twenty feet long, per¬
haps three and a half/four feet wide, lined
up against the wall on both sides of the
wing with an aisle down the middle. On
each of those tables there must have been
eight, possibly ten machines that were like
typewriters, except they were printers.
They had a little device on the side of them
that would read a tape; this was five-level
punch paper tape. You put the tape in the
reader, start the machine, and the
machine would type what was on the tape
in hard copy. We only had to type a head¬
ing on the page which consisted of basic
data like the TO and FROM, the intercept
station designator, and the date and time
of intercept.
Well, it didn’t take long to pick that oper¬
ation up. I knew that somewhere people
were selecting messages, and I began to
wonder how did they pick some messages
and throw some away. So as a result, I
enrolled in a Russian course at the
Department of Agriculture. Soon, I was off
the machines and pulling tapes, based on
keywords. Once we pulled the tapes, we
bundled them in categories and put num¬
bers on them that designated subject
areas. But it was a little more complicated
than that. Many times the print on the tape
was not clear, so we had to read the
punched holes. I think what we did was
critical because we threw away what we
thought wasn’t any good. If there was any¬
thing good in there, it was lost — it went in
the burn bag. We were called ‘scanners’.
We heard nothing about career choices
or moving to any other place. I went to the
Department of Agriculture to take Russian
because I didn’t know they would teach it
here. There were people in that place
[AFSA-213] who had degrees, had teaching
experience, and a bunch of them had
advanced degrees. It was kind of revealing,
I think, to ultimately find out that most of
the black people who came to the Agency,
no matter the kind of experience they had,
wound up there. 49
* * * *
The grade range in AFSA-213 was low. Many,
including Dick Hill, who retired as a GG-15 division
chief, attested to the fact that new employees
entered as a GG-2 or GG-3, despite having a college
degree or work experience.
I was working at the Bureau of Engraving
and Printing and had a master’s degree in
psychology from Howard University. I was
looking for better employment, and I sub¬
mitted an application to the agency. They
were hiring, and I was told that I was qual¬
ified to come in as a GS-7; however, they
didn’t have any GS-7 openings at the time.
I called back; they still didn’t have any
openings at a 7 level, but they had some
GS-5 openings. I could come in as a 5. I
decided that if I was qualified for a GS-7,
there was no sense coming in as a 5, and I
would wait a little longer. Well, I called
and called, and I finally got to the point
where I really wanted to get away from the
bureau. When I called again, they didn’t
have any GS-5 openings; they offered me a
GS-3, and I accepted. I was hired and sent
to whatever that number was — 294 or
Page 20
what not. It was entirely black with the
exception of the division chief. The deputy
division chief was a black named Jenkins
Johnson. The division chief was an army
captain. Not long after I arrived, my sec¬
tion was audited, and all of the jobs were
downgraded to GS-2. 50
Interviewees who worked in AFSA-213 singled
out the tape to hard-copy conversion process as
mind-numbing and document stamping as both
boring and dirty. Further, they revealed that they
worked under a production quota system. Scanners
were required to review a minimum of 300 mes¬
sages per day, and page printers were required to
print a minimum number of messages. If an
employee met the daily quota, his/her name was
posted on a board with a star. Monthly statistics
were kept, and employees who regularly failed to
meet their quotas were counseled. 51 This system of
recognition/discipline was taken quite seriously by
the subordinates, occasionally with most interest¬
ing consequences:
Boxes of tapes would come in [to AFSA-
213], and the only whites you would see
were service guys that would bring them
in. It was sort of funny, because some of
the people that had been scanning for
years knew the best tapes, the best links.
We were working on quotas, and you
wouldn’t want to get tapes from the bad
links because you wouldn’t get anything
from them. One lady almost fell in the box
of tapes trying to get the best ones. 52
The monotony of the tasks in AFSA-213 and the
underutilization of people were recognized as early
as 1948. According to Jack Gurin, founder of the
Russian plaintext exploitation branch, it was he
who initiated the scanning task in the traffic pro¬
cessing branch. Overwhelmed by the monthly traf¬
fic volumes, he sought to reduce the workload on
his translators and use them more efficiently.
There was this outfit that took these
paper tapes where you couldn’t read them
unless you could read these little holes.
You put them into this machine. You make
sure it’s all lined up properly, and you
press the ‘on’ button. It starts typing and
sheets of printed paper would come out.
The equipment was called ‘Cxco’. I don’t
remember what that stands for. These peo¬
ple, as I remembered, were all college
graduates; all black and all college gradu¬
ates. Their job was to sit there and watch
the machine and make sure it didn’t jam. If
it jammed, you stopped the machine and
pulled out the keys or fixed the paper.
Then you started it again and waited for
the next jam. That was their job. I looked at
them and said this is ridiculous. They were
college graduates. They all have some kind
of brains. Since the traffic consisted of offi¬
cial messages, they always had the
address. I took all the people in this outfit
and taught them the elements of Russian,
at least the alphabet. I gave them a sheet
that said, this [unit] is number 27, this
[unit] is number 29, and so forth. So what
they did, as the stuff was coming off, they
looked at it and looked at the address and
put down the correct number. It wasn’t
terribly challenging, but it was a lot better
than what they were doing before. 53
Low salaries, monotonous, routine tasks, and
limited opportunities for advancement made for
poor morale. In the summer of 1953, the Agency’s
managers sought to mitigate the situation by piping
in music.
Equipment for the reception of music is
being installed in the rear of wing 2, first
floor, A Building. Since this is considered
an area of low personnel morale as a result
of recent downgrading and the monoto¬
nous work, it is believed the music will be
well received. 54
Page 21
The music system was never installed. The docu¬
mentation contains no explanation, but the propos¬
al may have been abandoned because it was
impractical. The audio would have had to have been
at an ear-piercing level to be heard over the din of a
hundred teletype machines.
* * * *
Despite uncomfortable working conditions and
dim prospects for change, AFSA-213 employees
delivered large quantities of messages to the
Russian plaintext exploitation branch every month.
Undoubtedly, most were
motivated by the
simple need to
keep their
employment.
Iris Carr,
however,
expressed
other con¬
tributors to
her work
ethic - pride
of accom¬
plishment
and, despite
the racial dis¬
crimination she
experienced,
patriotism. At
the age of thir¬
ty-three, she
was older than most of the employees in AFSA-213
and was cited by many as being an unheralded hero
of the period - one who worked diligently and
sought to motivate others.
When I graduated from Prairie View
College [Prairie View, Texas] in 1932, I
received a Bachelor of Science degree with
a double major, English and math. I
taught school, first in a little town, Horton,
Texas, and then in Austin. In Texas at that
time, the highest level of education you
could get was a B.S. or a B.A. degree. There
were no other provisions for minorities.
You could not go to the University of Texas
or to any of the other white colleges. The
state of Texas would pay your transporta¬
tion to go to another school because teach¬
ers were required to go to school every
three years, hut I went every year because
I wanted to get another degree. So, several
summers I drove from Texas to New York
to take courses at Columbia University.
In 1944, I left Austin for Washington
because they would not allow blacks to pay
into the teacher’s retirement fund. I could
see myself as a little old lady of sixty or
seventy with no income and not able to
work. I knew I had to get someplace where
I could earn retirement benefits. I also
wanted to do something to help out in the
war.
My first job was at the Office of the
Recorder of Deeds. Then, after the war,
schools were opened for veterans and a
black electronics school [Hilltop Radio
Electronics Institute] on U Street needed
teachers. I graded math papers and taught
business English in this school for
radiomen and electricians. While I was
working there I met Bernice Mills, who
was working at the agency. She took my
application in and shortly after that I was
called for an interview.
The work [in AFSA-213] was rather bor¬
ing, because it was the same thing every
day. But if you knew what you were doing
and what you were looking for, it was more
interesting. We learned to read a Russian
dictionary, and we could pick up bits of
information on different tapes. From that,
Page 22
you would get an idea of what was going
on. If something was completely irrele¬
vant, we would throw it away, but I
explained to people that they had to be
very careful to give the analysts all the
messages we possibly can, because the
work was important.... Most of the people
I worked with were younger than I, and I
felt an obligation to be as good as I could be
to help them to be good. 5
Leaders of AFSA-213, ca. 1951.
(Photo courtesy of Clarence Pearson)
Page 23
Chapter 6 — 1948-1951: Wanted - Key Punchers and Equipment
Operators
The AFSA mission ... is to provide
authentic information for planners and
policy makers within the National Military
Establishment and other Governmental
Agencies having membership on the
United States Communication Intelligence
Board to apprise them of the realities of
the international situation, war-making
capabilities, vulnerabilities and intentions
of foreign countries, and to eliminate the
element of surprise from an act of aggres¬
sion by another country. - Requirements for
Conduct of an Optimum Communication
Intelligence Program, 14 July 1950 56
When armed conflict began in Korea in June
1950, 390 employees (military and civilian) were
assigned to the Machine Division. 57 Driven by the
Agency’s operating philosophy that exhaustive col¬
lection and processing of Russian communications
and extensive coverage of the communications of
Communist China were required to execute its mis¬
sion, that number rose to 573 in March 1951. 58
Cryptanalysis could be accomplished only through
machine manipulation of the data, and as intercep¬
tion capabilities expanded, appropriate increases in
processing personnel were required. Hiring of
African-Americans to become tabulating equip¬
ment operators or key punchers exploded in the
early 1950s.
Local recruitment of operators and card punch¬
ers was intensive. In October 1951, the Agency’s
personnel office reported that it had placed
recruiters in the U.S. Employment Service and in
the Department of the Army Office of Employee
Coordination, which allowed them to interview a
steady flow of applicants. 59 They had contacts at the
Civil Service Commission, and recruiters worked to
acquire applicants from other government agen¬
cies, such as the Veterans Administration, Census
“I detested one thing about MPRO. The
women had to do what we did and that was
handle those boxes of cards and paper. I never
liked that. The boxes were delivered to the
area and were put in a corner. You had to pick
them up, and it was heavy and hard lifting.
Most of the time the fellows would help the
girls.”
Maurice Bush, 12 April 1999
Bureau, and Government Accounting Office, that
announced reductions in force (RIFs). Usually
hired as GG-2S, the lowest pay scale, operators and
card punchers frequently requested transfers out of
the machine division soon after they reported for
duty. Considering the physical demands of the jobs,
a significant level of dissatisfaction is not surpris¬
ing:
- Tabulating machine operators will be
required to stand for long periods and to
lift and carry trays of cards weighing
approximately 20 pounds.
- Keypunch machine operators will be
required to sit at assigned machines for
long periods.
- Both tabulating and keypunch machine
operators, GS-5 and below, will be
required to work rotating shifts in a noisy
atmosphere due to the machines.
In most instances the skills and knowl¬
edge acquired in NSA-222 [IBM Branch]
are not easily adapted to work in other
branches, therefore time and money are
Page 24
expended unnecessarily when personnel
request a transfer. 60
Transfers were rare, and opportunities for
advancement within the organization were limited,
according to Maebelle Holmes, a college graduate
who entered the Agency in 1949:
I had just graduated from A&T and
applied for a job. It seems that they were
only accepting applications for key punch
operator. I took the [typing] test, but didn’t
pass - not fast enough. But they notified
me that I could get a job in the IBM section,
wiring boards. I was in the 8th wing. There
were more blacks than whites, but key
punch was virtually all black except for the
supervisors. They started me as a GG-2. I
was promoted to GG-3, then GG-4 and
when I got be a GG-5 ,1 became a first line
supervisor. I had about ten people working
for me. I tried to get out. Openings would
be posted on the board, and I would apply
for something, but it was almost unknown
to transfer. At that time, it seems like the
whites would come in with no degree and
in a little while they would move on up.
They would go to lunch with the bosses,
and would move right on up - not neces¬
sarily in the section in which they trained,
but in another section across the aisle or in
a different wing.
I liked my job, but I felt that they weren’t
always fair to us. 61
Novella Carr, who entered the Agency in
January 1951, spent the first twenty years of her
career in the machine processing (MPRO) organi¬
zation. She talked not only about the lack of mobil¬
ity, but also about the negative effect security had
on the flow of information about job opportunities:
I came to the Agency in January 1951
from the Veterans Administration where I
was being riffed. I was in the 8th wing.
MPRO was divided into three wings. The
6th wing was the key punch operators and
the 7th and 8th wings were tabulating
equipment operators. When I went into
the IBM [tabulating equipment] section it
was 90 percent black, and the whites that
were in there were not educated. All the
supervisors were white. There were some
black team captains and most of them had
some college. And all the key punchers
were black. Security was very tight. If you
didn’t have a need to know, you couldn’t go
into another section. We got to know some
of the girls in key punch because the wings
were open in the back and they would walk
through our section to go to lunch. And
you might know somebody in 213, which
was all black, because you caught a ride
with someone. So you never heard about
vacancies. You didn’t get transferred. You
just stayed. Supervisors would change,
and they would reorganize, but you just
stayed. 62
* * * *
Few memories of Arlington Hall Station are
more vivid than those of the stifling heat. In that
time, before air conditioning, windows were left
open and huge fans were used to circulate the hot,
humid air. In climate, as well as culture, the Agency
was a southern institution. That image is evoked
with remarkable clarity by the words of Dorothy
Amis, who began a thirty-four-year career in the
Agency as a tabulating equipment operator.
Arlington Hall was a beautiful place. You
see it was a former school, and they had
beautiful landscaped gardens in front of
the headquarters building. If it got too hot
in the evening, from 4 to 12, well, you could
go out and sit on the benches in the park
area. And if it didn’t cool off, they would
dismiss you for the evening. But in the
morning, it would start getting hot around
10. We would work right by the window,
Page 25
and all the windows were open. Novella
was one of those people singing all of the
time - singing and working on the
machines. It was just a different environ¬
ment. 63
Front view of Arlington Hall Station headquarters building
Garden in rear of Arlington Hall Station headquarters building
Page 26
Chapter 7 - 1948: R&D — A Different Kind of Place
It is the settled policy of the United States
Government that there shall be no dis¬
crimination in Federal employment or in
providing Federal services and facilities. -
From the text of President Truman’s message to
Congress on civil rights, 3 February 1948, New
York Times.
It is hereby declared to be the policy of
the President that there shall be equality of
treatment and opportunity for all persons
in the armed services without regard to
race, color, religion or national origin. -
From Executive Order 9981, signed by Harry S.
Truman, 26 July 1948.
Despite President Truman’s call for fair
employment in the federal government and the
issuance of Executive Order 9981, the Russian
plaintext traffic processing unit was essentially all
black well into the 1950s, and African-Americans
continued to predominate at the lower salary
grades in the machine division. The standout
exception to these realities was the hiring and
placement of African-Americans by the Research
and Development organization at AHS in 1948.
During a period when the New York Times was
accusing the Army of trying “to preserve a pattern
of bigotry which caricatures the democratic cause
in every corner of the world,” 64 the Agency hired its
first black engineer, Carroll Robinson. He was
assigned to the development team charged with
building the Agency’s first in-house developed digi¬
tal computer, ABNER 1. Mitchell Brown and
Charles Matthews, graduates of Hilltop Radio-
Electronics Institute, a black-owned electronics
school open to African-Americans in Washington,
D. C., were also hired in 1948. With the title of engi-
Carroll Robinson, the first
African-American engineer at
NS A
Mitchell Brown
Charles Matthews
(later photo)
Page 27
neering technician, they too were placed in mean¬
ingful positions, working side by side with their
white counterparts. By all accounts, the environ¬
ment for African-Americans in the Research and
Development organization was generally positive
and conducive to professional growth. Carroll
Robinson became the Agency’s first African-
American senior executive, retiring from federal
service as an office chief. Mitchell Brown became an
expert on technical devices and ended his career as
test director of the Digital Voice Processor
Consortium Test Program, which led to the
selection of equipment for the secure telephone
unit (STU) II. Charles Matthews was a project
engineer on ABNER l (the first in-house
designed digital computer), then SOLO, the
Agency’s first transistorized special-purpose
computer. He went on to hold a succession of
supervisory and middle-management positions
before retiring in 1988. Interviewed in 1999,
Mr. Matthews provided a glimpse of the
African-American experience in the 1940s:
I was born in Washington and went to
Dunbar High School. Toward the end of
WWII, I went into the Army
(Quartermaster Corps). I stayed in the
Army about nine months, then when I
returned I took advantage of the GI bill
and took technical courses at Hilltop
Radio-Electronics Institute. It was more or
less a black counterpart to the Capital
Radio Institute. The Agency was filled with
graduates from Hilltop. I don’t know how
we found out about the Agency. To my
Hilltop Radio-Electronics Institute
knowledge the Agency didn’t recruit, but I
“[After the war] I had to find a job. They didn’t give electrical type work to blacks here, so I went
on unemployment. As a veteran, I got 52-20. You got $20 for 52 months or $52 a month for 20
months, something like that. I would go to the VA every month to sign for my check, and eventually
I met a guy there, Mr. Hollywood, and told him that I was looking for work and my classification was
electrician. He said that he doubted that I could find any work as an electrician, but there was a guy
who repaired radios who might accept an apprentice. This was a black engineer, Mr. Gresham, who
worked at the Bureau of Standards on very classified stuff. He was very well qualified and he took
me on. When I went back to VA for my 52-20 check and told Mr. Hollywood that I had a job as an
apprentice, he said that if this man would open a school, he could send him all the personnel that he
needs. This was the founding of Hilltop Radio, and I was the first student.”
Mitchell Brown, 24 June 1999
Page 28
and two others decided to apply. I was so
anxious to get a job, I kept bugging them,
and I was the first to get hired. That was in
1948.1 was hired as an engineering techni¬
cian, Grade 9 (suhprofessional). It was a
good start, but whites that were hired as
engineering technicians with comparable
experiences and sometimes less training
were always hired at a higher grade than
we were. Even though you were hired at a
grade lower than your white counterpart,
it was still a job, and it probably was a pret¬
ty good salary at the time - $2,100. Most of
the blacks in the Agency at that time were
making $1,440, and in the early ‘40s to
mid- ‘40s most blacks in the government
were in the custodial force or were mes¬
sengers. Even with a college education,
that was the extent of employment. Then
they started hiring them as clerks. The best
jobs for blacks at that time were with the
post office.
Initially I started off tearing down equip¬
ment. Then the branch that I was in was
tasked to work on the first digital comput¬
er, ABNER 1. We built ABNER 1. I wasn’t
the only black in the organization. Carroll
Robinson was there. He was an engineer
and was hired shortly after I was hired. W.
C. Syphax, a black engineer was in there;
he built the power supply factory. But the
majority of the organization was white,
and they reacted to us very well. I never
had any negative experiences.
The Research and Development organization of
the late 1940s to mid-1950s was not free of racism.
In his interview, Mr. Brown supported the claim
that white engineering technicians with less or
comparable qualifications were hired at higher
grades. Carroll Robinson noted that for many years
blacks were not sent to overseas locations because
of the commonly held belief that they would be
unwelcome in the host country. These blots on the
record notwithstanding, R & D in 1948 stands as a
beacon of light in an otherwise dismal period in the
Agency’s history of black employment. 65
Page 29
Chapter 8 — 1951: Color Barrier Broken in Security Division
A National Agency Check is a good indi¬
cator of a person’s past life, but is of no
assistance in determining that person’s
present security risk. The use of a poly¬
graph for this purpose would reduce mate¬
rially the security risk involved in granting
interim clearances.... A recommendation
to allow the use of this machine is now
pending before the director. - AFSA-16
[Security Control Division] Monthly Operational
Report, 12 January 1951
Authority for the purchase of two Keeler
polygraph machines and the employment
and training of five persons was granted by
DirAFSA, - AFSA-16 Monthly Operational
Summary, January 1951
Effort is being made to take advantage of
a release of keypunch operators from the
Bureau of the Census. Ninety keypunch
applicants will be interviewed on 5 April
1951 - AFSA-02 Semi-Monthly Report for 16-31
March 1951
The confluence of increased hiring of African-
Americans, primarily for low-wage jobs in machine
processing and traffic processing, and the introduc¬
tion of the polygraph as part of the security screen¬
ing process resulted in a crack in the all-white
Security Division of AFSA. Raymond Weir, Jr., a
D.C. schoolteacher, had served in the Army in
WWII under Captain
Fred Hazard. In
November 1951,
now Major
Hazard, a
branch chief
in the
Security
Division,
recruited
and hired
Mr. Weir
as a poly-
graph
examiner -
the black
polygrapher
for black
applicants.
Raymo
He was a
... . African-American
trailblazer,
becoming the
first African-
American polygraph examiner in the United States,
and arguably the first African-American in the pro¬
fession anywhere in the world.
“Notwithstanding the current personnel strength position of the Agency, the conclusion has
been reached in this Division that to handle the employment problems of the Vint Hill Farms oper¬
ation, the interim operation at the new site and the certain turnover of personnel which is antici¬
pated at the time of the main move to Fort Meade, 66 we must at this time hire three additional inter¬
rogation technicians_The three individuals hired should he one female and two white male tech¬
nicians. Experience indicates that the requirement for an additional colored technician does not
exist.”
Monthly Operational Summary, Security Division, March 1953; NSA/CSS Archives Accession No. 42468
Page 30
Nevertheless, the Security Division - populated
by individuals with investigative or law enforce¬
ment training, including FBI veteran S. Wesley
Reynolds as the chief from May 1953 to December
1961 - was viewed by many as the most conserva¬
tive Agency organization. 67 For years Ray Weir was
restricted to interviewing only blacks at NSA. Not
until the 1960s, and then only in careful stages, was
he assigned a demographic cross-section of the
Agency’s applicants.
In December 1998, long after retiring as chief of
the Investigations Division (M54), Mr. Weir
recounted his story, including an amusing anecdote
that illustrates the incongruity of locating an arm of
the supersecret, intelligence agency in the heart of
the black community:
I was directly recruited into a program
I’d never heard of. I was a schoolteacher in
Washington at the time and the guy who
did the recruiting was Major Fred Hazard,
who was in Security. They wanted a black
polygraph examiner. They were process¬
ing a lot of women at the time, key punch
operators, most of whom were black, and
somebody decided that it might he good if
they had a black person be a polygrapher.
Their problem was there were no black
polygraph examiners anywhere. The
Agency hired me and sent me to school in
Chicago. 68 I graduated in, I guess,
December 1951.
When I came, there were no blacks in
Security and there were none in
Personnel. 69 Personnel and Security were
collocated because we had to process their
applicants. We were in the old Post Office
building on “U” Street, and the Agency was
trying to be very inconspicuous in the mid¬
dle of a black neighborhood. They were
trying to be inconspicuous, but they
deposited the training school there, where
all these white kids were coming. My boss,
Fred Hazard, the guy that hired me, was a
former L.A. police officer, and he went
around to a barber shop on U street to get
his hair cut. He came back and said that
when he went in the barber shop was full,
but by the time he was finished, he and the
barber were the only ones left. I told him
that he must realize that the barber shop
was the place where people met their
neighbors for the day and heard the news,
and he was in the way. Seriously, he looked
like a cop, and so they made themselves
scarce. Anyway, Security thought it was
just wonderful that they were going to
have a black person. But, of course, after I
started to work for them, the problem was
what did I do? Well, I was hired to test
these black people who were being hired
as key punch operators. I didn’t mind; they
were paying me the same salary, as if I
were testing everybody. But there were
days they weren’t hiring [blacks] and I had
nothing to do.
Well, I didn’t think that would last. It
finally came about that they had more peo¬
ple to interview than we had examiners,
including me. I did work charts and that
sort of thing to stay busy, but one day they
said, ‘Ray, do you think you could handle
one of these white people?’ I said, ‘yes’.
After the first one or two came in and I had
no problem, it was understood that I could
interview white men, preferably from the
north. Then, that fell by the wayside a little
bit later on, and I could interview white
men from the south. [Eventually] there
was nothing but young white girls to be
interviewed, and my boss said, ‘Ray, you
think you can take one of these women?’
and I said, ‘yes’. I suppose this was in the
1960s, late ’60s. This was the kind of thing
that couldn’t be rushed.
What the Agency wanted, what my super¬
visors wanted was to make sure that [who¬
ever] I interviewed would not have a legit-
Page 31
imate complaint about [the interview]. I
don’t think that most of what I ran into in
the Agency was prejudice, per se. There
was an unwillingness to do things which
would create problems, an unwillingness
to do things which would cause any kind of
publicity.
Ray Weir rose to the top of his profession,
becoming the first African-American president of
the American Polygraph Association and a recog¬
nized industry expert who testified before the
United States Senate Ethics Committee in its 1979
financial misconduct investigation of Senator
Herman Talmadge (D-Ga). 7 °
Page 32
Chapter 9 - 1950-1934: Strides toward Broad Integration;
Breakup of the Plantation
During the 1940s the Office of Operations prob¬
ably consistently followed the military model, i.e.,
all black functional units were normally formed
within larger white organizations. Herman Phynes,
for example, was head of the commercial code sec¬
tion, which is believed to have remained a segregat¬
ed unit until it folded (probably around 1950). Bill
Coffee, after leaving that section, supervised a
group of typists that transcribed automatic Morse
tapes. It is doubtful that this was a mixed group. An
indication of the personal feelings and controversy
that might have surrounded these black units is
provided by a story told by Jack Gurin, chief of the
Russian plaintext exploitation branch in 1948.
According to Jack, the critical need for clerical sup¬
port prompted him to approach the personnel offi¬
cer with a request for additional typists. He was told
that “Code l’s” were not available, but “Code 2’s”
could be obtained. The coding, it was explained,
was used on personnel records to designate race.
“Code 1” was white; “Code 2” was “colored.” On the
advice of the personnel officer, Gurin discussed
with the existing branch personnel the possibility of
bringing “Negroes” into the unit. One person, “a
very dignified, good-looking Alabama lady, object¬
ed, stating that she could not ‘sit next to a colored
person and work’.” Gurin relocated her desk, and
shortly thereafter an African-American man and
five women reported for duty. 71 Once again, howev¬
er, this was an all-black functional unit, in this case
a typing section, within a larger white organization.
Signs of change began to appear around 1950.
According to Dave Bryant, by that year he had
secured a transfer out of AFSA-213, the traffic pro¬
cessing branch, and was attending Russian lan¬
guage classes preparatory to working as a transla¬
tor/analyst in the Russian plaintext branch. James
Pryde was another early escapee from “the planta¬
tion.” A former radio operator with the Tuskegee
airmen, he joined the Agency in 1950 and was ini¬
An equally significant development in the early
1950s was the hiring of African-Americans as entry-
level analysts and linguists and, for the first time,
their immediate integration into a target element,
bypassing the traffic processing division altogether.
Both Clarence Toomer and Arthur Davis graduated
from Howard University in 1950, Mr. Toomer as a
premed major, Mr. Davis with a concentration in
German. In 1951, Mr. Toomer was an accounting
clerk at the Census Bureau. Seeking a better posi¬
tion, he registered with the Labor Department as a
job applicant and was subsequently interviewed at
the Pentagon by a representative of the Department
of Defense, in reality someone from AFSA. He was
hired and entered on duty as a GS-4 cryptanalytic
aide. Art Davis, meanwhile, had responded to an
advertisement in the local newspaper for govern¬
ment linguists. He too joined the Agency in 1951
and was placed in an intensive Russian language
tially assigned to
AFSA-213 and then
the mailroom.
Eventually,
however, it
was discov¬
ered that he
could read
automatic
Morse tapes,
and he was
transferred
to a signals
analysis sec¬
tion. A brilliant
career in Soviet
exploitation fol¬
lowed, first as an ana¬
lyst, then as a manager
and as a senior execu¬
tive. 72
Page 33
course. There he met his future sister-in-law,
Royolla Franklin Davis, a newly hired GS-5 Slavic
languages major from the University of California
at Berkeley. Following their initial training,
Clarence Toomer, Art Davis, and Royolla Franklin
Davis worked as junior professionals in major
Soviet exploitation divisions. 73
Minnie McNeal, a native of Philadelphia,
worked at the Commerce Department in
Philadelphia, then the
Census Bureau in
Washington, after
graduating from
the Philadelphia
High School for
Girls. She also
never worked
in the all¬
black traffic
division or in
machine pro¬
cessing, but in
a 1999 inter¬
view, she
described
how she
narrowly
escaped
that fate:
Minnie McNeal Kenny
(later photo)
I came to be interviewed at Arlington
Hall in 1951, and there was a woman. I
don’t know her name, but she was white
and she had also graduated from the
Philadelphia High School for Girls. She
recognized my class ring, and she not only
hired me, she vowed that I would not be
‘going down in the hole’. I didn’t have the
slightest idea what she was talking about. I
was just glad that I had a job. I went for
processing, and when I came back, she
assigned me upstairs. There was a group of
us [including] Barbara Barnes, Bess [nfi],
and Priscilla [nfi] [upstairs]. Most of the
blacks at that time were assigned to the
basement. We were [in] the first group
whose initial assignment was upstairs in
Operations in B Building. We were
assigned to the ‘U’ Street School, and we
stayed there until we got our clearances or
whatever. We came as a group to the
organization. We all worked under Sam
Hall on what they call ALLO [all other tar¬
gets]. We were dispersed throughout the
place. 74
Clarence Toomer, Art Davis, Royolla Franklin
Davis, and Minnie McNeal Kenny represented a
new breed of African-American employee in the
Operations Directorate. They were hired at the GS-
4 or GS-5 level, higher than the starting grades
offered to African-Americans in MPRO or Russian
plaintext traffic processing and equivalent to that
given most whites with comparable qualifications.
They were immediately placed in intensive training
programs to prepare them for professional careers
as a linguist or cryptanalyst, and upon completion
of training, they were assigned to substantive target
exploitation problems in a totally integrated envi¬
ronment. Not until well after they entered on duty
did they learn of the existence of AFSA-213. Fellow
Howard University graduates who were also hired
by the Agency, but sent to “the snakepit,” asked
Clarence Toomer how it happened that he was
assigned to an analytic organization. He did not
have an answer.
How were these young professional people of
color received in the workplace? The reports are
mixed. Most said that the work environment was, at
least superficially, generally free of racial overtones.
Their desks were intermixed with the others; they
occasionally ate lunch with their white colleagues in
the cafeteria; and advanced training in the core dis¬
ciplines of the agency - language, traffic analysis,
and cryptanalysis - was readily obtained. But they
still experienced the occasional slight; racial slurs
were overheard in office conversation; and few
African-Americans were assigned to the organiza-
Page 34
tion working on the highest priority Russian sys¬
tems. Tours at external locations were difficult to
come by, and as their careers progressed, there
appeared to be a “glass ceiling” that dictated, at the
executive level, that they were usually the “brides¬
maid,” or deputy, seldom the bride.
The sense of an undercurrent of racial bias was
understandable. In the early fifties, not only were
the all-black enclaves still very much in operation
inside the Agency, but the external environment
was still essentially segregated. Eugene Becker, who
retired as the assistant deputy director for support
services in 1992, described aspects of Washington
life and the Armed Forces Security Agency when he
entered on duty in January 1952.
I was struck by the fact that the bus that
I rode out to Arlington Hall was a segregat¬
ed bus, because you transferred from the
District bus and trolley to Virginia buses at
the Federal Triangle. So I got on the bus
that took you to Arlington, and it was seg¬
regated. This was 1952 .1 remember being
struck by that. Having gone to school in the
district [George Washington University], I
knew that the movie theaters were segre¬
gated. I remember going to the Blue
Mirror. That was the club where you had
whites and Afro-Americans mixing. There
were not many of them. But I had never
given it a thought that the bus system in
Northern Virginia was still segregated.
Washington in those days was a Southern
town, totally dominated by Southern cul¬
ture.
The fellow that I talked to in my inter¬
view was clearly on the Russian problem. I
could decipher that much from his ques¬
tions and the way he inquired about my
interests, but before my final clearance
came through, it was decided that I would
go in a class. I think there were five of us
that started in an Arabic class. I think that
it was the first one begun at the Agency.
We went to the school on U Street and
14th, the old post office building, for six
months. We had a great instructor. The
agency language department was excellent
at that time. We were in an all-white class,
as were most of the classes. I don’t remem¬
ber seeing any Afro-Americans in the lan¬
guage classes at the time. There may have
been one or two that came in while we
were going through our six-month period,
but on reporting for work in January, I
don’t remember seeing any in the school.
The Agency is a microcosm of the nation
at large. It was neither ahead of it or
behind it, and so it reflected, to a precise
degree, what was going on - what the
country was. The workforce had a liberal
cast, but seeded among the workforce
were plenty of racists. They were not hard
to find. That was palpable in the place. You
knew who they were. 75
“[In Washington], we went to our own
segregated areas. We went to our own
clubs, our own theaters. We had nice the¬
aters, nice clubs, so you didn’t realize you
were being segregated that much. It was¬
n’t something that was bothersome. We
had the Lincoln theater, the Booker T.,
and in northeast [Washington], we had
the Strand theater.”
Carroll Robinson, 8 June 1999
* * * *
Page 35
By the mid-fifties, there were even positive
changes within the traffic processing division (now
designated NSA-63) and the machine section. Carl
Dodd, an NSA-63 supervisor, drafted job descrip¬
tions for the other leaders in the organization which
eventually were approved and resulted in an
upgrade of all positions in the division. 76 An inter¬
view with William Pinchback, however, revealed
that although measured progress had been
achieved by 1955, remnants of the old practices
were still very much evident. Mr. Pinchback, a for¬
mer Army cryptologic operator and a 1950 graduate
of Storer College, entered on duty in 1954 as a GS-3
communications clerk in NSA-63. He was assigned
to a recently added branch that received, sorted,
and distributed hard copy messages (other than
Russian plaintext radioprinter). At that time, he
recalled, whites were occasionally hired and
assigned to his unit and that one, with only a high
school diploma, was brought in at a higher grade
than he. The system was slowly changing, however,
for this time, after the unfairness was brought to the
attention of the section chief, Mr. Pinchback was
promoted with less than the minimum time in
grade. The next year, Mr. Pinchback applied for an
advertised vacancy for a cryptanalytic aide. In a
then rare demonstration of equal opportunity in
competitive selection, he was interviewed and cho¬
sen for the job. Once in his new office, his supervi¬
sor confided that Pinchback’s army experience as a
code clerk, coupled with the scores that he achieved
on Agency aptitude tests, indicated that he would
be a good cryptanalyst. In the mid-fifties, though,
these facts and a college degree had not prevented a
black man from being hired as a GS-3 and being ini¬
tially assigned to the mailroom in the National
Security Agency. 77
Significant professional advancement for
African-Americans in the machine division during
the 1950s was limited, but James Bostic broke con¬
vention. In 1952 he left the Census Bureau and
joined AFSA as a tabulating equipment operator. A
gifted, largely self-taught programmer and systems
analyst, he became known as the “the Optimizer”
during a career that paralleled the agency’s
advancements in
computer technol¬
ogy. An early
tour in ABNER
1 operations
was followed
by assign¬
ment as a
program¬
mer on
ABNER 2
and as a
software
designer for a
mass file stor¬
age and retrieval
system. Before
retiring in 1986,
he led the termi¬
nal subsystem
development
team for a
UNIX-based system.
James Bostic,
The Optimizer
(undated from the 1970s)
* * * *
The Research and Development organization,
already home to a number of African-American
males in engineering specialties, was also breaking
other barriers in 1951. Vera Shoffner Russell, an
African-American mathematician, reported to the
Agency that year and was assigned as a program¬
mer on the early computers, ABNER 2, ATLAS 1,
and ATLAS 2. But the glass was only half full. She
believes, as do the vast majority of African-
Americans hired before 1954, that she started at a
lower grade than similarly qualified whites. Her
story also includes familiar references to the
employment options for educated blacks in the
1950s and to the harsh realities of segregation:
I graduated in 1951 from West Virginia
State College and took the test for math
majors at the U.S. Employment Center in
Charleston. I was a math and physics
Page 36
major and had an offer to teach school in
Winston-Salem [North Carolina], but I
didn’t want to teach. At the time, however,
for the most part, when [blacks] came out
of college, you went to teach. Teaching and
preaching were the only things open.
Then, I got this letter to come to
Washington and take a physical at the
Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, I came into
the Agency, which was located at the time
on Arlington Boulevard. Now, my maiden
name was Shoffner, and West Virginia
is only three percent black, so my
notification of hiring, which I
saw in my personnel folder
years later, carried a Sv’, and
they offered me a GS-5.
When I got here, they asked
if I would accept a 4.1 took
it. I didn’t know anything
about
GS ratings, and I really think they offered
me the job because they thought I was
white. As far as segregation goes, I did bet¬
ter in West Virginia, because Washington
would make you stand in carry-out lines.
But you didn’t have that in West Virginia.
The first year I came here, I sat up at the
drugstore counter down on Connecticut
Avenue, and I opened the compartment
and took a donut. And all the commotion!
All the waitresses were white, and they
kept going back and forth - passing me. I
wanted a cup of coffee, and nobody
gave me a cup. So, the guy from
behind the cigar counter came up
and told me, ‘We do not serve
colored people at the count¬
er’. 79
Vera Russell
(later photo)
Page 37
Epilogue
I was so involved in what the Agency
stood for, and I wanted it to be better. I had
a feeling that things were going to get bet¬
ter. Everybody in there was not evil. I felt
that one day African-Americans would
break out of this box and be able to go into
reporting or personnel or other areas, if
they were prepared. I preached - be pre¬
pared - Iris Carr, 30 June 1999
In 1956, as part of a major Agency reorganiza¬
tion, NSA-63, the successor to AFSA-213 and
AFSA-211 (another receipt and distribution unit
with a high percentage of African-Americans), was
dissolved. Many blacks, particularly the tape print¬
ers, moved to the new collection organization
where they continued to perform the tasks of
receiving, converting, and distributing intercept
data. A large number of the scanners, however, and
many who had worked on the staff of NSA-63 were
transferred to various divisions in GENS, Office of
General Studies, where they successfully pursued
careers as analysts, staff officers, and managers.
As a group, African-Americans suffered from
institutional racism at Arlington Hall Station. The
segregationist policies of the Army were strictly
enforced during the war years and, with the singu¬
lar exception of Research and Development, were
generally followed for years thereafter. It was a
white-male-dominated environment that reflected
Army racial policies and southern attitudes.
African-Americans were routinely hired at lower
grades and shuffled into the most menial jobs. They
waited longer for fewer promotions and received
less training, which constrained their opportunities
to assume higher-paying positions.
Early in the 1950s, as the Army’s long-standing
support for the “separate, but equal” doctrine
faded, barriers at AHS began to crumble. African-
Americans were hired not only as keypunches and
clerks, but also as analytic aides, linguists, and
mathematicians. Some that had entered the Agency
through the all-black traffic processing division
successfully transferred to organizations that held
the promise for challenging, rewarding work in a
racially integrated environment. The contributions
of whites who acted as agents for change during this
period cannot be overlooked or underestimated.
African-Americans who started their careers during
the early fifties and rose to leadership positions
acknowledged the assistance and mentorship of
many Caucasians, several of whom, Melba
McCarthy, Benson Buffham, and Jack Gurin, were
interviewed for this manuscript.
The dissolution of NSA-63 erased a visible and
notorious manifestation of racial separation, but
questions about equality in recruitment, hiring,
assignments, job training, awards, and promotions
continued to be raised for years afterwards. Many
of those who started at Arlington Hall Station
became the Agency’s social activists of the 1960s
and 1970s at its new location, Fort Meade,
Maryland. There, new chapters in the African-
American experience at NSA would be written.
Page 39
End Notes
1. Alan M. Osur, Blacks in the Army Air Forces dur¬
ing WWII: The Problem of Race Relations (Washington,
D.C., 1977), 11.
2. Bernard C. Nalty and Morris J. MacGregor, eds.,
Blacks in the Military: Essential Documents
(Wilmington, DE, 1981), 108.
3. Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops
(Washington, D.C., 1994), 111-112.
4. Nalty and MacGregor, Blacks in the Military, 114-
115-
5. Osur, Blacks in the Army Air Forces during
WWII, 5.
6. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 45.
7. Osur, Blacks in the Army Air Forces during
WWII, 5.
8. Charles H. Wesley, The Quest for Equality: From
the Civil War to Civil Rights (Cornwell Heights, PA,
1969), 176.
9. CCH oral history interview with Carl Dodd, 14
July 1999.
10. NSA predecessor organizations carried various
names between 1930 and 1952, i.e., Signal Intelligence
Section, Signals Security Service, Signal Security Branch,
Signal Security Division, Signal Security Agency, Army
Security Agency, and Armed Forces Security Agency.
11. Frank B. Rowlett, The Story of Magic: Memoirs
of an American Cryptologic Pioneer (Laguna Hills, CA,
1998), 47-
12. James L. Gilbert and John P. Finnegan, eds., U.S.
Army Signals Intelligence in World War II,
(Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1993),
26-27.
13. History of the Signal Security Agency, Vol. 1,
Part 1, Organization, 12-16, 38-52.
14. Personnel records of Bernard W. Pryor and inter¬
view with Delores Schommer, 6 May 1999, who entered
on duty with SIS on 16 July 1940. According to Mrs.
Schommer, Bernie was the single messenger for the
organization.
15. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A
History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital
(Princeton, NJ, 1967), 231. According to records main¬
tained by the Office of Workforce Information, Official of
Personnel Management, the total number of civilians
employed by the federal government in 1938 was
882,226.
16. Personnel Clearances and Historical Study, NSA
Archives-ACC#i7862.
17. Memo from E.S. Turner, Adjutant General, to
Chief Signal Officer, 18 April 1942, NSA Archives -
ACC#i898i.
18. History of the Signal Security Agency, Vol. 1,
Part 1, 88.
19. NARA RG457, Box 1027, Signal Security Agency
- Personal Interviews, July 15-September 1943.
20. CCH oral history interview, General Earle F.
Cooke, 15 July 1982.
21. Personnel Records, William D. Coffee.
22. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (New
York, 1998), 112-116.
23. History of the Signal Security Agency, Volume
Two: The General Cryptanalytic Problem, 229-230.
24. Ibid.
25. Memo for the Control Officer, SSA, from SPSIS-
9 (Intelligence Branch), 15 September 1944, RG457, Box
1005, ACC#io6i6.
26. Mission and functions, B-3-b and organizational
charts, 15 November 1944 and 1 February 1945, NARA,
RG457, Box 843, ACC#646.
27. Ibid.
28. Mission and functions, B-3-b; CCH oral history
interview with Benson K. Buffham, 15 June 1999.
29. Mission and functions, B-3-b; personnel records
of Herman Phynes.
30. Personnel records of Bernard Pryor.
31. The plans and priorities officer developed collec¬
tion plans and adjusted the tasking for intercept sites to
meet changing requirements.
32. CCH oral history interview with Benson K.
Buffham, 15 June 1999.
33- B-3-b organizational chart, NARA RG457, Box
843, ACC#646.
34. Intercept and Control Branch Annual Report,
1945-1946; NSA/CSS Archives, ACC#i7394; personnel
records, William D. Coffee.
35. Annual Report of the Cryptanalytic Branch, July
1945-June 1946; NSA/CSS Archives ACC#47439 and
personnel records of Herman Phynes.
Page 40
36. History of the Signal Security Agency, Volume
11: The Machine Branch, published by ASA, Washington,
D.C., 1948.
37. CCH oral history interview with Norm Willis, 11
January 1999.
38. Dr. Solomon Kullback was one of the three pio¬
neering “junior cryptanalysts” hired by William
Friedman in April 1930. Harry Lawrence Clark joined
SIS later that year as a cryptographic clerk to analyze
secret inks. Sam Snyder entered on duty with SIS in 1936
and worked as a cryptanalyst on both Italian and
Japanese systems prior to WWII. Colonel Spencer Ball
Akin was O.I.C., Signal Intelligence Service, 25 July
1939-2 May 1941.
39. CCH oral history interview with Delores
Schommer, 5 May 1999.
40. Phone interview with David Shepard, 22 May
2000.
41. CCH oral history interview with Geneva Trusty
Arthur, 28 September 1999.
42. History of GENS-6 Civil Division of Office of
General Studies; NSA/CSS Archives, ACC#9895, and
CCH oral history interviews with Jacob Gurin on 26
April 1995 and 15 October 1999.
43. CCH oral history interviews with Jacob Gurin, 26
April 1995 and 15 October 1999, and David Bryant, 23
February 1999.
44. Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology dur¬
ing the Cold War, 1945-1989, Book I: The Struggle for
Centralization, 1945-1960 (CCH-E32-95-03), 168.
45. 27 March 1950 memorandum from C.P. Collins,
Chairman USCIB Intelligence Committee to Coordinator
of Joint Operations; NSA/CSS Archives, ACC#8243.
46. Report by the Director, Armed Forces Security
Agency, to the Armed Forces Security Council on
Requirements for Conduct of an Optimum
Communication Intelligence Program, 14 July 1950;
NSA/CSS Archives, ACC#522i.
47. From 1949 until sometime in 1951, AFSA-213
was a branch. A December 1951 organizational chart
shows AFSA-213 as a division. A reorganization in
August 1952 resulted in a new designator, AFSA-29.
When NSA was created, AFSA-29 became NSA-63. In
the interest of simplicity and consistency, the Russian
radioprinter traffic processing division will usually be
referred to by the earlier designator, AFSA-213.
48. Undated and unsigned report; however, a pen¬
ciled notation indicates it was authored before 31 May
1950; NSA/CSS Archives ACC#8243. Data extracts from
the paper later appeared in the 14 July 1950 report from
the director, AFSA, to the Armed Forces Security
Council.
49. NSA oral history interview with William Jones
conducted by R.D. Farley on 14 August 1986.
50. CCH oral history interview with Richard Hill, 18
October 1999. The low grade structure was confirmed in
other interviews and by the personnel records of
Jefferson Tancil, a supervisor in the traffic division.
From January 1950 to November 1951, he was a GS-6
section chief responsible for eighteen to thirty communi¬
cations clerks, GG-2 to GG5.
51. CCH oral history interviews: William Byrd on 8
March 1999; Richard Hill on 18 October 1999; and Carl
Dodd (by phone), 17 May 1999.
52. CCH oral history interview with Bernice Mills on
10 November 1999.
53. Jack Gurin interview, 15 October 1999.
54. Comptroller Monthly Operational Summary,
July 1953; NSA/CSS Archives, ACC#42468.
55. CCH oral history interview with Iris Carr, 16 June
1999.
56. Report by the Director, AFSA, to the Armed
Forces Security Agency Council, 14 July 1950, 3;
NSA/CSS Archives, ACC#522i.
57 - Ibid., 36.
58. AFSA-02 Semi-Monthly Report for 16-31 March
1951; NSA/CSS Archives ACC#42468.
59. AFSA-153 Monthly Operational Summary,
October 1951; NSA/CSS; NSA/CSS Archives,
ACC#42468.
60. Memorandum, “Excessive Number of Transfer
Requests,” from Deputy Head, NSA-222 (IBM Branch)
to NSA-220A (Assistant Chief for Administrative
Management, Machine Division), 2 December 1952;
NSA/CSS Archives ACC#26o6.
61. Oral history interview with Maebelle Holmes, 26
April 1999.
62. Oral history interview with Novella Carr, 19
January 1999.
63. CCH oral history interview with Dorothy Amis,
19 February 1999.
Page 41
64. Morris J. MacGregor, Jr., Integration of the
Armed Forces, 1940-1965, (Washington,D.C.: Center for
Military History, 1989), 363, footnote 81.
65. Information in this chapter obtained from the
following oral history interviews: Carroll Robinson, 8
June 1999; Charles Matthews, 22 June 1999; Mitchell
Brown, 24 June 1999.
66. By 1949 AFSA had outgrown the temporary
buildings and converted dormitories at Arlington Hall
Station. Also, in the wake of the national angst over the
Soviet Union’s first nuclear test, AFSA was directed by
the JCS to identify a standby or disaster site outside the
metropolitan Washington area. The two requirements
were merged, and Fort Knox, Kentucky, was selected as
the site for a new headquarters and operations building.
This decision was reversed, however, when the prospect
of massive civilian resignations became apparent, and
the search continued. Several sites in northern Virginia
and Maryland were considered, but on 5 February 1952
Fort Meade was officially chosen as the new location for
AFSA.
67. Other examples of appointments to the Office of
Security: Two former FBI employees and one former
ONI employee were chosen to become the Special
Research Unit (investigations of alleged employee
wrongdoings). Monthly Operational Summaries,
Security Division, February and March 1953; NSA/CSS
ACC#42468.
68. Chicago was the home of the Keeler Institute, the
training school for polygraph examiners.
69. This is inaccurate. At least one African-
American, Bernie Pryor, was an employee counselor in
the personnel division at this time.
70. Polygraph: Journal of the American Polygraph
Association, December 1979, Vol. 8, No. 4.
71. CCH interview with Jack Gurin, 15 October 1999.
72. CCH interview with James Pryde, 15 December
1998.
73. CCH oral history interviews with Clarence
Toomer, 12 January 2000, and Arthur Davis, 8 February
2000.
74. CCH oral history interviews with Minnie McNeal
Kenny, 30 March 1999. ALLO targets were those other
than the Soviet Union.
75. CCH oral history interview with Eugene Becker,
19 January 1999.
76. CCH oral history interview with Carl Dodd, 2
April 1999.
77. CCH oral history interview with William
Pinchback, 25 January 1999.
78. CCH oral history interview with James Bostic, 4
November 1999.
79. CCH oral history interview with Vera Russell, 8
February 1999.
Page 42
J eannette Williams retired from the National Security Agency in 1998
after thirty-five years of service. During the 1960s and 1970s, at the
height of the arms race, she was an intelligence analyst and report¬
ed extensively on missile and space activities. Later in her career, she
assumed successively responsible management positions, including
assignments as the Agency's senior operational officer and as an assis¬
tant inspector general. Since retiring from federal service, Mrs. Williams
has been employed as a principal research analyst with Logicon DPC
Technologies under contract to NSA.
Mrs. Williams holds a degree in English from Ohio State University and is
a graduate of the Federal Executive Institute and the National Senior
Cryptologic Course. She resides in Carroll County, Maryland, with her
husband, Walter, and enjoys the arts, gardening, reading, and commu¬
nity affairs.
M s. Dickerson began her career at NSA in 1967 in computer opera¬
tions. After holding numerous analytic and administrative posi¬
tions, Ms. Dickerson worked in the National Cryptologic School as
an education and training officer and adjunct faculty member. While at
the School, she served as a member of a career development panel. A
member of Women in NSA, Ms. Dickerson assisted in education and
career advancement for women in the Agency. Toward the end of her
career, she served in the Center for Cryptologic History as a historian.
After retiring from NSA in 1998, Ms. Dickerson worked under contract as
a senior systems analyst in the NSA Technology Support Division and
later as a senior research analyst in the Center for Cryptologic History.
A graduate of the University of Baltimore, Ms. Dickerson holds a B.A.
degree in sociology and business management. She is married, the par¬
ent of four and grandmother of four. Ms. Dickerson resides in Anne
Arundel County, Maryland, and presently works at the Museum of
Industry in Baltimore, Maryland, as a docent coordinator.
Page 43
